On July 11, The Journalist’s Resource and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing’s CASW Connector hosted an online chat discussing how journalists can better cover hot-button topics, focusing on abortion as an example of a medical topic that has become increasingly political. The panelists shared lessons from their research and reporting, offered guidance for journalists covering abortion, and answered questions from the audience.

The event was moderated by Naseem Miller, senior health editor at The Journalist’s Resource, and the panelists were:

• Sarah McCammon, a national political correspondent at NPR who covers abortion policy among other divisive topics.
• Katie Woodruff, a public health social scientist in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Services at the University of California, San Francisco.

Below you’ll find a recording of the chat and links to resources curated by the panelists, as well as other links and tips provided during the session.

Sign up for CASW Connector’s and The Journalist’s Resource’s newsletters to receive updates about future online events.

Takeaways from Dr. Woodruff’s research:

• Research links:
  • Coverage of Abortion in Select U.S. Newspapers – PMC, Women’s Health Issues, 2019. 
  • Coverage of abortion in major U.S. newspapers, 2022-23, poster presentation for National Abortion Federation annual meeting, April 2024.
  • More details about Dr. Woodruff’s 2022-23 research from the University of California, San Francisco.
• Her 2019 paper found most news coverage treated abortion as a political buzzword without exploring the issue in-depth.
• Stories largely didn’t cover the experiences of people seeking abortion and omitted basic facts, such as that abortion is common and safe and that pregnancy carries a higher risk for women, especially people of color.
• Following the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, abortion coverage significantly increased. More stories covered the policy and health aspects of this issue in depth.
• Stories of people seeking abortion are more common in news stories in 2022-23 than pre-Dobbs, but news coverage tends to focus on atypical cases. Basic facts about abortion and pregnancy are still rarely included.
• News coverage also rarely focuses on medication abortion, even though this is now the most common method.
• We have an overwhelming body of evidence showing that abortion is safe, and that anti-abortion policies lead to harm. Journalists could do more to ensure these facts are clearly stated in stories.
• Be careful of language used to describe abortion policies; terms like “heartbeat ban” or referring to people seeking abortion as “mothers” can impact readers’ perceptions.

Finding sources, navigating interviews:

• Reproductive health clinics and providers can offer sources, including doctors and patients. Health care providers are good secondary sources if you aren’t able to talk to a patient.
• Abortion funds and advocacy groups can also connect journalists with sources. (Don’t call an abortion hotline; connect with organizers.) However, some of these organizations have been overwhelmed post-Dobbs and may not have the capacity to or be comfortable with sharing patient information. It is also worth taking note of whether any groups pay sources, as a few do this.
• Ethical consent is important during interviews. Make sure the source understands who you are and how their story will be used. Make it clear what it means to be on- or off-the-record, and let sources know they can choose not to answer a question if they’re uncomfortable with it.
• Vetting information from a source can include searching public databases and checking information between patients and providers.
• Expand your perception of who can be a source. Historians and other scholars may be able to offer historical context for news pieces.
• Providing sources with some level of anonymity, such as using a first name only, can help protect those at more risk from speaking out about their experience. Be clear about your outlet’s policy for anonymity during the interview.

McCammon’s other tips for covering hot-button topics:

• A framework to avoid bias: A journalist’s own experiences and perspectives are not nearly as important to a news story as the evidence. Consider your job to be informing the audience and shedding light on different aspects of an issue, not persuading anyone of a particular argument.
• Personal stories from sources can help your audience understand the impacts of policies on real people. These may be tough to find for some stories but are important to include when possible.
• Don’t assume you have all the answers, even if you’re experienced in covering an issue. Be curious and open-minded.
• Aim to be as accurate and specific as possible in language to reduce misinterpretation. For example, some outlets (like NPR) have moved to use “abortion rights supporter” and “abortion rights opponent” over “pro-choice” and “pro-life.”
• Ask rigorous questions of politicians and policy platforms and weigh their positions against scientific evidence and potential health impacts.

Articles & resources:

• Media briefing: Reproductive health and abortion, SciLine, July 11, 2024.
• Abortion pill mifepristone: An explainer and research roundup about its history, safety and future, The Journalist’s Resource, Naseem S. Miller, November 1, 2023.
• Covering abortion as a health care issue in all its complexity, politics aside, Association of Health Care Journalists, Tara Haelle, May 24, 2023.
• Covering abortion as a health care story, not just a political one, Association of Health Care Journalists, Jordan Gass-Pooré, June 12, 2024.
• NPR Public Editor: How abortion language evolves, NPR, Kelly McBride, April 4, 2024.
• Post-Roe: Journalistic “objectivity” meets the heated issue of abortion, Center for Journalism Ethics, Audrey Thibert, November 29, 2022.
• Editing Controversial Science, in Knight Science Journalism Science Editing Handbook, Laura Helmuth.
• Research highlights need for public health approach in news reporting of gun violence, The Journalist’s Resource, Naseem S. Miller, June 25, 2024.
• Trauma-informed journalism: What it is, why it’s important and tips for practicing it, The Journalist’s Resource, Naseem S. Miller, April 13, 2022.
• Covering scientific consensus: What to avoid and how to get it right, The Journalist’s Resource, Denise-Marie Ordway, November 23, 2021.

This tip sheet was published in collaboration with the CASW Connector, where it first appeared. It has been lightly edited for style.

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Competition for audience attention is fierce in this era of infinite scroll, with a seemingly endless array of information sources for readers to filter.

But new research in Science Advances suggests editors and reporters can get more readers to click their stories using this strategy: Write simple headlines.

Based on more than 30,000 experiments conducted by the Washington Post and Upworthy, the finding is an important reminder for news organizations. Past research suggests mainstream news outlets tend to use more complex wording than hyper-partisan outlets, which use shorter sentences and less formal language.

“Extreme news has already gotten the memo,” says Todd Rogers, one of the authors of the paper and a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, where The Journalist’s Resource is housed.

But headline preference can be in the eye of the beholder. In fact, the authors find in follow-up surveys that professional journalists do not favor simple headlines, “suggesting that those writing the news may read it differently from those consuming it,” the authors write. This in contrast to past research indicating that other professionals, such as lawyers, prefer simple writing.

Here’s how Rogers and co-authors — Hillary Shulman, an associate professor of communication at The Ohio State University and David Markowitz, an associate professor of communication at Michigan State University — assess headline complexity:

• Whether the headline includes common words.
• Use (or not) of a formal, complex, analytic style.
• Readability, which accounts for words per sentence and syllables per word.
• Overall character count.

To measure common words and analytic writing the authors used statistical software called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. For readability and character count, they used text analysis packages in the statistical programming interface R.

The study doesn’t offer rules for headlines, such as writing at a particular reading grade level or staying below a certain character count.

But Rogers says the findings suggest a rule of thumb for journalists to consider: If you’re choosing between two headlines, where both make sense, are accurate and otherwise equal, choose the less complex one.

In the newsroom, gauging simplicity can be subjective. Rogers recommends journalists choose words that are shorter, more common and that they aim for simple grammatical construction when writing headlines.

Thousands of headline tests at the Washington Post and Upworthy

Readers may not be aware that the headlines they see on a news website could be different from what another reader sees. News outlets often test headlines to gauge which one audiences prefer. These are called A/B tests — a portion of site visitors get headline A, others get headline B.

The authors obtained all headline tests the Washington Post ran from March 3, 2021 to December 18, 2022. In total, they analyzed nearly 20,000 headlines, the popularity of which was determined by the click-through rate, or the percentage of people who clicked on that headline.

Some of the Washington Post headline tests included three or four headlines for a single story. Regardless of the content of the headline, the authors’ analysis links simpler headlines with higher click rates.

While Rogers notes that “the effect is not gigantic” he says crafting simpler headlines “will disproportionately help those who are not doing it, which is the non-extremist news.”

The authors note in the paper that because of the large size of the Washington Post’s readership, even a small percentage bump in click rates could mean tens of thousands more reads.

And simple headlines are not necessarily shorter, the research finds. While using common words, an informal style and better readability were associated with higher click rates, character count was not.

For example, this Washington Post headline, about Oprah Winfrey’s March 2021 interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, has 14 words:

“Meghan and Harry are talking to Oprah. Here’s why they shouldn’t say too much.”

The authors’ analysis finds it is less complex than this 13-word version:

“Are Meghan and Harry spilling royal tea to Oprah? Don’t bet on it.”

The authors did the same analysis with headline tests from Upworthy conducted January 2013 to April 2015 across more than 105,000 headlines.

The conclusion was the same.

“Thousands of field experiments across traditional (i.e., The Washington Post) and nontraditional news sites (i.e., Upworthy) showed that news readers are more likely to click on and engage with simple headlines than complex ones,” the authors write.

Audiences and journalists see headlines differently

In two follow-up surveys the authors aimed to explore whether the results of the headline tests held up in a controlled setting and whether professional news makers also prefer simple headlines.

In early May 2023, the authors recruited 524 people from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and assessed whether they more closely read simple or complex headlines. Participants were roughly equally split between men and women, with about 77% identifying as white, 11% Black, 7% Asian, 1% American Indian or Alaska Native and 3% multiracial.

They were shown 10 headlines and asked to pick one they’d click on a news site.

Within that set, participants saw four “target” and six “control” headlines. The target headlines were either simple or complex. All participants saw the same control headlines.

Participants were split into two treatment groups: either four simple or four complex headlines. Those who saw simple headlines picked one of them 34.8% of the time, compared with 15.3% for control headlines.

But when participants got the complex headlines, they picked one of them 22.2% of the time, compared with 27.7% for the controls.

Participants were also presented with a three-word phrase and asked to recall whether the phrase had appeared in the headlines. They were more likely to recognize the three-word phrase within simpler headlines.

“[T]he finding that readers engage less deeply with complex writing has important practical implications,” the authors write. “Specifically, writing simply can help news creators increase audience engagement even for stories that are themselves complicated.”

For the second survey, 249 participants were recruited from a September 2023 webinar about strategies for people writing for busy readers, which Rogers led and The Journalist’s Resource presented.

All participants identified as professional writers and most were current or former journalists with about 14 years of experience, on average. They were presented with the same headlines and asked the same questions as participants in the other survey.

The authors write that the findings of this survey represented a “notable departure” from the other findings. The writers and journalists surveyed did not prefer simpler headlines over complex ones, and they were much better at recalling whether the three-word phrase appeared in both simple and complex headlines.

“They’re not deterred by cognitive complexity,” Rogers says. “They don’t have the same intuitions or experiences reading as normal news readers.”

That, Rogers adds, is a main takeaway for journalists: Be aware that your experience and your audiences’ experience when interpreting headlines may be leagues apart — and lean into simplicity.

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For decades, researchers have urged journalists to avoid framing gun violence solely as a crime issue and provide a broader public health context. Yet, as evidenced by the findings of a recent study of local TV news in Philadelphia, the focus on the crime angle remains very much at the forefront of gun violence coverage.

The researchers’ call for change was further underscored on June 25, when the U.S. surgeon general declared firearm violence a public health crisis for the first time in a 40-page advisory, calling on the nation to take a public health approach to address gun violence, much like it has done before to address tobacco and car crashes.

In “Public health framing of firearm violence on local television news in Philadelphia, PA, USA: a quantitative content analysis,” published in BMC Public Health in May 2024, researchers analyzed 192 TV news clips aired on four local news stations between January and June 2021 and found that 84% contained at least one element that could be harmful to communities, audiences and gun violence survivors. Some of those elements are visuals of the crime scene, not following up on the story, naming the treating hospital and the relationship between the injured person and the shooter.

Meanwhile, public health elements such as root causes of gun violence, solutions and sources other than law enforcement officials were missing from most news clips.

“The main message is that the majority of reporting on firearm violence, at least in TV news, has many harmful content elements and we have to do better,” says the study’s lead author, Dr. Jessica Beard, director of research at The Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting, a trauma surgeon at Temple University Hospital and an associate professor at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University. “The public does not have an accurate understanding of what gun violence is and the policy implications are huge.”

Beard was part of a panel on covering gun violence as a public health emergency at the Association of Health Care Journalists’ annual conference in New York City earlier this month. She also spoke with The Journalist’s Resource after the panel.

Previous studies have shown that when the news media covers community gun violence as a single incident in isolation, audiences are more likely to blame victims. This approach also reinforces racist stereotypes and suggests that policing is the most effective way to prevent violence, undermining public health measures that could curb gun violence, Beard and her co-authors of the BMC Public Health study write.

This type of coverage also has a negative effect on people who are injured in shootings, they point out.

Injured people say that graphic content, inaccuracies and mention of treating hospitals resulted in distress, harm to their reputation and threats to their personal safety, according to a 2023 study by the same research team, which included interviews with 26 adults who had recently sustained a gunshot wound. They said that news reports that neglected their personal perspectives left them feeling dehumanized and compounded their trauma.

“Some people were afraid to get discharged from the hospital,” Beard says.

More about the study and its findings

The researchers chose to study TV news because more people in the U.S. get their news from TV than other legacy sources such as radio and print, according to a 2023 survey by Pew Research Center. (That same survey found that more Americans get their news from digital devices than from TV, and there’s a need for research on firearm violence content in digital news, the authors note.)

They focus on Philadelphia for several reasons. The city is the birthplace of Eyewitness News, which launched in 1965, and Action News, which launched in 1970. The two newscasts pioneered reporting approaches that have been criticized for the way they are produced and for casting a negative light on Black communities, the authors write. A 2022 story by The Philadelphia Inquirer delves deep into this history.

Moreover, the epidemic of gun violence in Philadelphia reflects a trend across the country where shooting rates have increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, disproportionately affecting young people and Black people. A June report from the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report finds that between January 2019 and September 2023, rates of emergency medical services encounters for gun-related injuries were highest among males, non-Hispanic Black people and people between 15 and 24 years old.

The study compares Philadelphia news clips based on two main characteristics: news clips that focused on a single incident in isolation, called episodic framing, and those with more of a public-health approach, exploring the broader social and structural context in which the violence occurs, called thematic framing.

Among the findings:

• Nearly 80% of the stories used episodic framing.
• In 21% of the clips, a law enforcement official was the main interview source.
• In 50.5% of the clips where the journalists were the only news narrators, police were the predominant source of information on firearm violence.
• More than 84% of the stories contained at least one harmful element, such as a visual of the crime scene, not following up on the story, the number of gunshot wounds, the name of the treating hospital and the relationship between the injured person and the shooter. About 7% of the clips included video or audio of the shooting.
• The 192 news clips mentioned a total of 433 injured people.
• More than 80% of the clips mentioned an injured person, although in 67%, the only information about injured people was age or gender.
• None of the 192 news segments included a health or public health professional or an injured person as the main interview source.
• Only 10% of the clips included discussions about public health solutions.
• And only five stories (2.6%) used the word “prevent.” Another four stories (2.1%) offered resources related to firearm prevention.

The authors point out that the study findings may not be generalizable to all U.S. cities, to national TV news, or to print, radio, or social media content.

Also, it’s still not clear whether harmful reporting on community firearm violence increases rates of gun violence. The connection between the two is complex, Beard says, adding that she’s hoping to explore and study the topic in the future.

In their 2023 study, Beard and colleagues asked injured participants if they would be willing to speak with a journalist about their shooting incident and what would they tell the journalist.

One participant said, “You report the gun violence, but why not do a follow-up report […] for the victims, the survivors, the families that had to bury these people, the whole process? Just don’t do a guy got shot over there, a guy got shot over here. You’re making people more fearful. You’re more fearful, you’re going to arm yourself more.”

The authors underscore the study participant’s point: Reporting on firearm violence with limited information and no follow-up stories may perpetuate fear, which may contribute to increasing firearm use and, in turn, the increasing incidence of firearm violence.

The BMC Public Health study was funded by the Stoneleigh Foundation, Lehigh University Research Investment Programs, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gun violence as a public health issue

Two days after the Pulse nightclub mass shooting, where 49 people were killed by a lone gunman in Orlando, The American Medical Association adopted a policy calling gun violence “a public health crisis,” which requires a comprehensive public health response.

In addition to death, gun violence can result in long-term physical, mental and financial burdens among injured individuals, studies show, including a 2023 study published in JAMA Network Open. It impacts communities, causing fear and economic decline. And compared with infectious diseases, it poses a larger burden on society in terms of potential years of life lost, according to a 2020 report by the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence (now the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions).

Gun violence affects the health of entire communities, said Dr. Ruth Abaya, an attending physician in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia emergency department, during the panel on covering gun violence as a public health emergency at the Association of Health Care Journalists.

“We’re seeing young people who have crippling anxiety that is limiting their abilities to participate in daily life, they’re being medicated and even being hospitalized, and that’s directly related to this other public health crisis of gun violence,” said Abaya, who’s also the senior director of health systems and CVI — community violence intervention — integration at The Health Alliance for Violence Intervention. “And I’m also seeing young people with other unrelated chronic diseases like asthma that’s out of control because their caregiver was killed in a violent incident.”

Recommendations for journalists

The study’s findings are not surprising to Rick Brunson, a senior instructor of journalism at the University of Central Florida’s Nicholson School of Communication and Media.

Brunson, who worked as a reporter and editor in Central Florida for 20 years, including at a local TV station, mentions several reasons why many TV stations’ coverage of gun violence lacks a broader public health context.

Commercial news stations’ economic lifeblood depends on ratings, and as much as audiences may say they are put off by coverage of crime and violence, stations’ internal research shows that people watch crime news, he says.

Also, with the plethora of streaming options and multiple screens, viewers are distracted and TV stations are often vying for their attention, which results in newscasts packed with videos and short stories without space for context and explanation.

And there’s the broader, growing trend of news avoidance among audiences.

“When they watch the news, it just makes them feel despair and exhaustion, especially the focus on crime coverage and because there’s no context,” Brunson says. “They’re just presented with problem after problem after problem. Violence after violence.”

“The question for news directors to ask in the face of this where people are just avoiding the news and you’re seeing your audience erode more and more, year after year, is can the news business also be in the hope business?” Brunson says. “It’s going to take some serious consideration and the reversal of the kind of coverage that you put on your air.”

Even though there are widely accepted journalistic guidelines to protect victims and audiences in cases of suicide, mass shootings, sexual assault, abuse, and crime involving minors, no such guidelines crafted by journalists and public health practitioners exist for reporting on community firearm violence, Beard and her colleagues note in their study.

They say their research aims to lay the foundation for understanding harmful content in TV news clips and share several recommendations, including the practice of trauma-informed reporting.

Trauma-informed journalism recognizes the need for journalists to better understand how trauma can affect survivors and how to avoid reporting that could cause additional harm to vulnerable people and those who have experienced trauma. The practice also helps journalists to protect their own mental health.

When covering firearm violence, trauma-informed reporting would involve engaging with survivors using trauma-informed principles, including giving them control over the narrative of their injuries. It also minimizes harmful elements such as graphic visuals.

“This type of reporting could humanize firearm-injured people and build empathy in audiences, deconstructing the existing racialized news narratives around firearm violence in cities,” the authors write.

They also recommend:

• Public health practitioners partner with firearm violence survivors to offer alternative perspectives to journalists reporting on firearm violence.
• Journalists seek training in trauma-informed practices and solutions journalism.
• Newsrooms adopt a public health approach to reporting on firearm violence, provide resources to audiences and use the public health framing.

To help journalists and newsrooms meet these recommendations, the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting and Frameworks Institute created a free gun violence reporting toolkit, which provides more information on trauma-informed reporting, the drivers of gun violence, and tips for more complete news coverage of gun violence.

Brunson advises reporters to seek out public health professionals as a source to help add context to their reporting and to read BMC Public Health study.

“People are always trying to tell us what to do,” Brunson says. “But we should take that as a compliment because the folks like the people who did this study acknowledge that they’re doing it because the media has influence, and journalists help shape and frame public debate and discussions and the problems that get looked at. Policymakers look at what journalists are doing.”

Additional research

Systematic disparities in reporting on community firearm violence on local television news in Philadelphia, PA, USA
Jessica H. Beard, et al. Preventive Medicine Reports, April 2024.

“Like I’m a nobody:” firearm-injured peoples’ perspectives on news media reporting about firearm violence
Jessica H. Beard, et al. Qualitative Research in Health, June 2023.

Firearm Injury — A Preventable Public Health Issue
Jay Patel, et al. Lancet Public Health, November 2022.

Making the News: Victim Characteristics Associated with Media Reporting on Firearm Injury
Elinore J Kaufman, et al. Preventive Medicine Reports, December 2020.

Resources

• To help journalists with better reporting of gun violence, PCGVR has created a free gun violence reporting toolkit.
• “Firearm Violence: A Public Health Crisis in America” is the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2024 advisory, a first of its kind for gun violence.
• The American Public Health Association’s Gun Violence page links to several useful resources.
• The Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC/Radio-Canada), and the Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma recently launched a news industry toolkit on trauma-aware journalism.
• This fact sheet by the American Public Health Association lists some of the recommended public health responses to gun violence.

The post Research highlights need for public health approach in news reporting of gun violence appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Over the past two years dozens of newsrooms around the world have crafted policies and guidelines on how their editorial staff can or should — or cannot or should not — use artificial intelligence tools.

Those documents are tacit acknowledgement that AI, particularly generative AI like chatbots that can produce images and news stories at a keystroke, may fundamentally change how journalists do their work and how the public thinks about journalism.

Generative AI tools are based on large language models, which are trained on huge amounts of existing digital text often pulled from the web. Several news organizations are suing generative AI maker OpenAI for copyright infringement over the use of their news stories to train AI chatbots. Meanwhile, The Atlantic and Vox Media have signed licensing deals allowing OpenAI access to their archives.

Despite the litigation, some news organizations have used generative AI to create news stories, including the Associated Press for simple coverage of company earnings reports and college basketball game previews.

But others that have dabbled in AI-generated content have faced scrutiny for publishing confusing or misleading information, and the utility of generative AI in journalism is not obvious to everyone.

“The reality is that AI models can often prepare a decent first draft,” Julia Angwin, longtime tech reporter and newsroom leader, wrote recently in a New York Times op-ed. “But I find that when I use AI, I have to spend almost as much time correcting and revising its output as it would have taken me to do the work myself.”

To gain insight on what the future of AI and journalism might look like — and where the industry’s biggest challenges are — I reached out to Angwin, who has reported for The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica and in 2020 launched the award-winning nonprofit newsroom The Markup, which, among other things, covered recent AI developments.

In early 2023 Angwin left The Markup and founded Proof News, a nonprofit news outlet that uses the scientific method to guide its investigations. Angwin is also a 2023-2024 Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, where The Journalist’s Resource is housed.

Social media creators and trust in news

During her time at the Shorenstein Center, Angwin interviewed a panel of social media creators to find out what journalists can learn from how creators and influencers share information and build trust with audiences. This summer, Angwin will publish a discussion paper on the findings.

One important way social media creators build trust is by directly engaging with their audiences, she found.

At the same time, some news organizations have turned away from direct audience engagement online.

“Newsrooms have, for all sorts of legitimate reasons, turned off the comments section because it’s hard to moderate,” Angwin says. “It also does mean that there’s a feeling from the audience that traditional news is less accountable, that it’s less responsive.”

AI in journalism

Angwin is not optimistic that generative AI will be useful to journalists, though AI tools are “totally legit and accepted” for reporting that includes statistical analysis, she says. But Angwin points to several concerns for the future, including that the use of copyrighted content to train generative AI systems could disincentivize journalists from doing important work.

Here are a few other highlights from our conversation about journalistic trust and the future of AI in journalism:

• The news business isn’t ready. Competing in an information ecosystem with generative AI that creates plausible sounding (but sometimes untrue) text is a new frontier for news organizations, which will have to be even more attentive in showing audiences the evidence behind their reporting.
• To gain trust, journalists need to acknowledge what they don’t know. It’s OK for journalists not to know everything about a topic they’re covering or story they’re pursuing. In published work, be upfront with audiences about what you know and areas you’re still reporting.   
• When covering AI tools, be specific. Journalists covering AI topics need to know the types of AI tools out there — for example, generative versus statistical versus facial recognition. It’s important to clearly explain in your coverage which technology you are talking about.

The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

Clark Merrefield: Some commentators have said AI is going to fundamentally change the internet. At this point it would be impossible to disentangle journalism and the internet. How would you characterize this moment, where AI is here and being used in some newsrooms? Is journalism ready?

Julia Angwin: Definitely I’d say we’re not ready. What we’re not ready for is the fact that there are basically these machines out there that can create plausible sounding text that has no relationship to the truth.

AI is inherently not about facts and accuracy. You’ll see that in the tiny disclaimer at the bottom of ChatGPT or any of those tools. They are about word associations. So for a profession that writes words that are meant to be factual, all of a sudden you’re competing in the marketplace — essentially, the marketplace of information — with all these words that sound plausible, look plausible and have no relationship to accuracy.

There’s two ways to look at it. One is we could all drown in the sea of plausible sounding text and lose trust in everything. Another scenario is maybe there will be a flight to quality and people will actually choose to go back to these mainstream legacy brand names and be like, “I only trust it if I saw it, you know, in the Washington Post.”

I suspect it’s not going to be really clear whether it’s either — it’s going to be a mix. In an industry that’s already under a lot of pressure financially — and, actually, just societally because of the lack of trust in news.

[AI] adds another layer of challenge to this already challenging business.

CM: In a recent investigation you found AI chatbots did a poor job responding to basic questions from voters, like where and when to vote. What sorts of concerns do you have about human journalists who are pressed for time — they’re on deadline, they’re doing a thousand things — passing along inaccurate, AI-generated content to audiences?

JA: Our first big investigation [at Proof News] was testing the accuracy of the leading AI models when it came to questions that voters might ask. Most of those questions were about logistics. Where should I vote? Am I eligible? What are the rules? When is the deadline for registration? Can I vote by text?

Or, in one ZIP code, it said there’s no place for you to vote, which is obviously not true.

Llama, the Meta [AI] model, had this whole thing, like, here’s how you vote by text: There’s a service in California called Vote by Text and here’s how you register for it. And it had all these details that sounded really like, “Oh, my gosh! Maybe there is a vote-by-text service!”

There is not! There is no way to vote by text!

Having experts involved made it easier to really be clear about what was accurate and what was not. The ones I’ve described were pretty clearly inaccurate, but there were a lot of edge cases where I would have probably been like, “Oh, it seems good,” and the election officials were like, “No.”

You kind of already have to know the facts in order to police them. I think that is the challenge about using [AI] in the newsroom. If you already knew the answer, then maybe you should have just written the sentence yourself. And if you didn’t, it might look really plausible, and you might be tempted to rely on it. So I worry about the use of these tools in newsrooms.

CM: And this is generative AI we’re talking about, right?

JA: Yes, and I would like to say that there is a real difference between generative AI and other types of AI. I use other types of AI all the time, like in data analysis — decision trees and regressions. And there’s a lot of statistical techniques that sort of technically qualify as AI and are totally legit and accepted.

Generative AI is just a special category and made of writing text, creating voice, creating images, where it’s about creation of something that humans used to only be able to create. And that is where I think we have a special category of risk.

CM: If you go to one of these AI chatbots and ask, “What time do I need to go vote and where do I vote?” it’s not actually searching for an answer to those questions, it’s just using the corpus of words that it’s based on to create an answer, right?

JA: Exactly. Most of these models are trained on data sets that might have data up until 2021 or 2022, and it’s 2024 right now. Things like polling places can change every election. It might be at the local school one year, and then it’s going to be at city hall the next year. There’s a lot of fluidity to things.

We were hoping that the models would say, “Actually, that’s not something I can answer because my data is old and you should go do a search, or you should go to this county elections office.” Some of the models did do that. ChatGPT did it more consistently than the rest. But, surprisingly, none of them really did it that consistently despite some of the companies having made promises that they were going to redirect those types of queries to trusted sources.

The problem is that these models, as you described them, they’re just these giant troves of data basically designed to do this are-these-words-next-to-each-other thing. When they rely on old data, either they were pulling up old polling places or they’re making up addresses. It was actually like they made up URLs. They just kind of cobbled together stuff that looked similar and made up things a lot of the time.

CM: You write in your founder’s letter for Proof News that the scientific method is your guide. Does AI fit in at all into the journalism that Proof News is doing and will do?

JA: The scientific method is my best answer to try to move on from the debate in journalism about objectivity. Objectivity has been the lodestar for journalism for a long time, and there’s a lot of legitimate reasons that people wanted to have a feeling of fairness and neutrality in the journalism that they’re reading.

Yet it has sort of devolved into what I think Wesley Lowry best describes as a performative exercise about whether you, as an individual reporter, have biases. The reality is we all have biases. So I find the scientific method is a really helpful answer to that conundrum because it’s all about the rigor of your processes.

Basically, are your processes rigorous enough to overcome the inherent bias that you have as a human? That’s why I like it. It’s about setting up rigorous processes.

Proof is an attempt to make that aspect the centerpiece. Using the scientific method and being data driven and trying to build large sample sizes when we can so that we have more robust results will mean we will do data analysis with statistical tools that will qualify as AI, for sure. There’s no question that will be in our future, and I’ve done that many times in the past.

I think that is fine — as I think it’s important to disclose those things. But those tools are well accepted in academia and research. Whenever I use tools like that, I always go to experts in the field, statisticians, to review my work before publishing. I feel comfortable with the use of that type of AI.

I do not expect to be using generative AI [at Proof News]. I just don’t see a reason why we would do it. Some of the coders that we work with, sometimes they use some sort of AI copilot to check their work to see if there’s a way to enhance it. And that, I think, is OK because you’re still writing the code yourself. But I don’t expect to ever be writing a headline or a story using generative AI.

CM: What is a realistic fear now that we’re adding AI to the mix of media that exists on the internet?

JA: Generative AI companies, which are all for-profit companies, are scraping the internet and grabbing everything, whether or not it is truly publicly available to them.

I am very concerned about the disincentive that gives for people to contribute to what we call the public square. There’s so many wonderful places on the internet, like Wikipedia, even Reddit, where people share information in good faith. The fact that there’s a whole bunch of for-profit companies hoovering up that information and then trying to monetize it themselves, I think that’s a real disincentive for people to participate in those public squares. And I think that makes a worse internet for everyone.

As a journalist, I want to contribute my work to the public. I don’t want it to be behind a paywall. Proof is licensed by Creative Commons, so anyone can use that information. That is the best model, in my opinion. And yet, it makes you pause. Like, “Oh, OK, I’m going to do all this work and then they’re going to make money off of it?” And then I’m essentially an unpaid worker for these AI companies.

CM: You’re a big advocate of showing your work as a journalist. When AI is added to that mix, does that imperative become even more critical? Does it change at all?

JA: It becomes even more urgent to show your work when you’re competing with a black box that creates plausible text but doesn’t show how it got that text.

Trust is declining — not just in journalistic institutions but in government, in corporations. We are in an era of distrust. This is where I take lessons from the [social media] creators because they don’t assume anyone trusts them. They just start with the evidence. They say, here’s my evidence and put it on camera. We have to get to a level of elevating all the evidence, and being really, really clear with our audiences.

CM: That’s interesting to go down to the story level, because that’s fundamentally what journalism is supposed to be about. The New York Times of the world built their reputation on the trust of their stories and also can lose it based on that, too.

JA: A lot of savvy readers have favorite reporters who they trust. They might not trust the whole institution, but they trust a certain reporter. That’s very similar to the creator economy where people have certain creators they trust, some they don’t.

We’re wired as humans to be careful and choose with our trust. I guess it’s not that natural to have trust in that whole institution. I don’t feel like it’s a winnable battle, at least not for me, to rebuild trust in giant journalistic institutions. But I do think there’s a way to build trust in the journalistic process. And so I want expose that process, make that process as rigorous as possible and be really honest with the audience.

And what that means, by the way, is be really honest about what you don’t know. There’s a lot of false certainty in journalism. Our headlines can be overly declarative. We tend to try to push our lead sentences to the max. What is the most declarative thing we can say? And that is driven a little bit by the demands of clickbait and engagement.

But that overdetermination also alienates the audience when they realize that there’s some nuance. One of the big pieces of our ingredients label is the limitations. What do we not know? What data would we need to make a better determination? And that’s where you go back to science, where everything is iterative — like, the idea is there’s no perfect truth. We’re all just trying to move towards it, right? And so we build on each other’s work. And then we admit that we need someone to build on ours, too.

CM: Any final thoughts or words of caution as we enter this brave new world of generative AI and journalism, and how newsrooms should be thinking about this?

JA: I would like it if journalists could work a little harder to distinguish different types of AI. The reality is there are so many kinds of AI. There’s the AI that is used in facial recognition, which is matching photos against known databases, and that’s a probability of a match.

There’s then the generative AI, which is the probability of how close words are to each other. There’s statistical AI, which is about predicting how a regression is trying to fit a line to a data set and see if there’s a pattern.

Right now everything is conflated into AI generally. It’s a little bit like talking about all vehicles as transportation. The reality is a train is really different than a truck, which is really different than a passenger car, which is really different than a bicycle. That’s kind of the range we have for AI, too. As we move forward journalists should start to distinguish a little bit more about those differences.

The post Proof News founder Julia Angwin on trust in journalism, the scientific method and the future of AI and the news appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

News articles in recent weeks have documented the spread of misinformation about hormonal birth control methods on popular social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube and X, formerly called Twitter. Influencers with large and small followings are sharing unsubstantiated claims about the side effects of contraceptives, while directly or indirectly encouraging others to stop using them.

This trend has not escaped researchers, who for several years have been investigating what people who can get pregnant are posting on social media platforms about hormonal and non-hormonal birth control methods. Understanding the drivers of these trends is important because they have implications for policy and patient care, according to researchers. Some worry that during the post-Dobbs era, when there are continued strikes against reproductive rights in the U.S., misinformation about birth control on social media could have a negative influence on contraceptive preferences — potentially leading to more unwanted pregnancies.

More than 90% of women of reproductive age have used at least one contraceptive method, according to a 2023 report by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics. However, the report also finds that the use of male condoms and withdrawal methods increased between 2006 and 2019, while the use of the birth control pill decreased. Non-hormonal contraception methods, including condoms, spermicides, withdrawal and menstrual cycle tracking, are 10% or less effective than hormonal contraceptives. The only exceptions are surgical sterilization and the copper intrauterine device.

To be sure, not all birth control-related content posted on social media platforms is negative, studies show. Health care professionals are sharing educational material with a high rate of engagement and non-health care professional users share their positive experiences with the birth control methods they use.

But as you will see in the studies curated below, researchers also find that social media users, including influencers, share inaccurate information about hormonal contraceptives on various social media platforms, discuss their discontinuation of birth control in favor of non-hormonal methods and engage in unsubstantiated fear-mongering of hormonal contraceptives.

Researchers also have learned that the content posted on social media platforms has changed in tone over time, mirroring the shift in the national political discourse.

In a 2021 study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, researchers analyzed more than 800,000 English-language tweets mentioning at least one contraceptive method between March 2006, when Twitter was founded, and December 2019. They coded the sentiment of tweets as positive, neutral or negative.

“What we found over time was that the number of neutral tweets went down for each and every one of the birth control methods, and people became more polarized with regards to how they talk on these social media platforms over those 13 years,” says study co-author Dr. Deborah Bartz, an OB-GYN at Brigham and Women’s Hospital with expertise in complex family planning and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.

In a February 2024 commentary in the Journal of Women’s Health, University of Delaware researchers Emily Pfender and Leah Fowler argue that ongoing dialogue about contraception on social media provides “a glimpse into public sentiment about available options” to people who can get pregnant.

The authors also note that misinformation and disinformation about hormonal contraception may have a larger effect on health disparities, especially among historically marginalized groups who may already mistrust the medical establishment.

“This may contribute to unintended pregnancy and delayed care, further widening health disparities and hindering progress toward equitable reproductive health outcomes,” Pfender and Fowler write.

Side effects

There are known side effects to hormonal birth control methods, including headaches, nausea, sore breasts and spotting. Most are mild and disappear with continued use or with switching to another method. Among hormonal contraceptives, only the Depo-Provera injection has been linked with weight gain, studies show.  

But some social media influencers have spread false claims about the potential side effects of hormonal birth control methods, ranging from infertility to abortion to unattractiveness. Despite these false claims, physicians and professional organizations such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists find today’s contraceptive options safe and very effective.

“They’re about the most low-risk prescription that I give,” says Dr. Megana Dwarakanath, an adolescent medicine physician in Pittsburgh. “I always joke that if something goes wrong in someone’s life, they’re within the reproductive years, it always gets blamed on birth control.”

Dwarakanath says her young patients are most worried about two side effects: weight gain and mood. “Those are the things that they will almost always attribute to their birth control at a time that their bodies are also changing very rapidly,” she says. “Things like mental health diagnoses or personality disorders also tend to crop up during the time young people have started or have been on birth control.”

Most research on the link between oral contraceptives and cancer risk comes from observational studies, according to the National Cancer Institute. Overall, the studies have consistently shown that the risks of breast and cervical cancer are slightly increased for women who use oral contraceptives, whereas the risk of endometrial, ovarian and colorectal cancers are reduced.

The use of hormonal birth control has also been associated with an increase in the risk of developing blood clots, studies show. But that risk is not universal for everyone who takes hormonal birth control. This risk is higher for women 35 and older, those who smoke, are very overweight or have a history of cardiovascular disease. Overall, 3 to 9 out of 10,000 women who take the pill are at risk of developing blood clots within a given year. The risk for women who don’t take the pill is 1 to 5 out of 10,000.

There is no association between the pill and mood disorders, according to a large body of research, including a 2021 cohort study of nearly 740,000 young women. 

It’s worth noting the dearth of research into women’s reproductive health due to chronic underfunding of women’s health research. An analysis of funding by the U.S. National Institutes of Health finds that in nearly three-quarters of the cases where a disease affects mainly one gender, the institute’s funding pattern favored males. Either the disease affected more women and was underfunded, or the disease affected more men and was overfunded, according to the 2021 study published in the Journal of Women’s Health.

Aside from underfunding, conducting robust research into the long-term effects of birth control is complex.

“Historically, people haven’t felt that it’s ethically OK to randomize people to birth control methods in large part because the outcome of unintended pregnancy is greater,” for people who are given the placebo, Bartz says.

Research on birth control misinformation on social media

Social media use is widespread among young adults. More than 90% of Americans between 18 and 29 reported ever using YouTube, while 78% said they had used Instagram, 62% used TikTok and 42% used Twitter, according to a 2023 survey of 5,733 U.S. adults by Pew Research Center.

These years overlap with the demographic of people who are most likely to use birth control. And because the use of contraceptives is less stigmatized today, people are more likely to talk with one another about their questions and concerns or share that information online.

In addition to investigating the general landscape of social media posts about birth control, researchers are also interested in the type of content influencers, who typically have 20,000 or more followers, post, because of their persuasive power over their audiences.

“When influencers disclose personal experiences and beliefs about various topics, audience members tend to form similar attitudes especially when they feel connected to the influencer,” Pfender and M. Marie Devlin write in a 2023 study published in the journal Health Communication.

Below we have curated several studies published in recent years documenting the spread of birth control misinformation on social media. The roundup is followed by a quick reference guide on female contraceptives and their actual potential side effects.

Contraceptive Content Shared on Social Media: An Analysis of Twitter
Melody Huang, et al. Contraception and Reproductive Medicine, February 2024.

The study: The authors explore how contraceptive information is shared on X and understand how those posts affect women’s decisions. They analyze a random 1% of publicly available English-language tweets about reversible prescription contraceptive methods, from January 2014 and December 2019. The 4,434 analyzed tweets included at least 200 tweets per birth control method — IUDs, implants, the pill, patch and ring.

The findings: 26.7% of tweets about contraceptive methods discussed decision-making and 20.5% discussed side effects, especially the side effects of IUDs and the depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA or Depo-Provera) shot. Discussions about the pill, patch or ring prompted more discussions on logistics and adherence. About 6% of tweets explicitly requested information. Tweets about IUDs were most popular in terms of likes.

More importantly, 50.6% of the tweets were posted by contraceptive users, while only 6% came from official health or news sources. Tweets from news or journalistic sources were more frequent than tweets from a health care professional or organization.

Some tweets contained misinformation represented as facts, such as the unsubstantiated claim that IUDs can cause fertility issues. Others were outwardly misogynistic, shaming women and claiming that they wouldn’t be able to have kids because of using hormonal birth control.

One takeaway: “While Twitter may provide valuable insight, with more tweets being created by personal contraceptive users than official healthcare sources, the available information may vary in reliability. Asking patients about information from social media can help reaffirm to patients the importance of social networks in contraceptive decision-making while also addressing misconceptions to improve contraceptive counseling,” the authors write.

What Do Social Media Influencers Say About Birth Control? A Content Analysis of YouTube Vlogs About Birth Control
Emily J. Pfender and M. Marie Devlin. Health Communication, January 2023.

The study: To explore what social media influencers shared on YouTube about their experiences with hormonal and non-hormonal methods of birth control, the researchers analyzed 50 vlogs posted between December 2019 and December 2021. Most of the 50 influencers were categorized on YouTube as Lifestyle (72%) and Fitness (16%). They had between 20,000 and 2.2 million subscribers each.

The findings: In total, 74% of the influencers talked about discontinuing hormonal birth control. About 44% said the main reason they were discontinuing birth control was to be more natural, while 32% said they wanted to improve their mental health and 20% were concerned about weight gain.

Forty percent of influencers mentioned using non-hormonal birth control methods such as menstrual cycle tracking, condoms, non-hormonal IUDs and the pull-out method. Twenty percent reported switching from hormonal to non-hormonal methods.

One takeaway: “Our content analysis revealed that discontinuation of hormonal birth control is commonly discussed among [social media influencers] on YouTube and sexual health information from influencers might not provide accurate educational information and tools… this is especially concerning given that social media is young adults’ primary tool for sexual health information. Future research is needed to understand the effects of SMI birth control content on sexual health behaviors,” the authors write.

Hormonal Contraceptive Side Effects and Nonhormonal Alternatives on TikTok: A Content Analysis
Emily J. Pfender, Kate Tsiandoulas, Stephanie R. Morain and Leah R. Fowler. Health Promotion Practice, January 2024.

The study: The authors analyzed the content of 100 TikTok videos that used the hashtags #birthcontrolsideeffects and #nonhormonalcontraception. Their goal was to understand the types of content about side effects of hormonal and non-hormonal contraceptives on TikTok.

The findings: The videos averaged about 1 minute and garnered an average of 27,795 likes, 251 comments and 623 shares. For #birthcontrolsideeffects, 80% of the audience was 18 to 24 years old and videos with that hashtag had 43 million views worldwide as of July 7, 2023.

Thirty-two percent of the videos were by regular users (non-influencers), 26 by clinicians, 13% by health coaches and 2% by companies. Only 3% had a sponsorship disclosure and 6% included a medical disclaimer, that the person was not a doctor or was not providing medical advice.

Most of the 100 videos (71%) mentioned hormonal contraception. Among them 51% discussed unspecific hormonal contraceptives, 31% talked about the pill and 11% about hormonal IUDs. Four of the 71 creators explicitly recommended against using hormonal contraceptives.

Claims about hormonal contraceptives were mostly based on personal experience. About 25% of the creators cited no basis for their claims, 23% included outside evidence, including unspecified studies or information from the FDA insert, and 11% used a combination of personal and outside evidence.

Almost half (49%) mentioned discontinuing their hormonal contraception, with negative side effects cited as the most common reason.

The creators talked about mental health issues, weight gain, headaches, and less common risks of various cancers or chronic illness, change in personality and blood clots. They were less likely to mention the positive aspects of birth control.

About 52% of videos mentioned non-hormonal contraception, including copper IUDs and cycle tracking.

Nine of the 100 creators expressed feeling dismissed, pressured, gaslit or insufficiently informed about contraception by medical providers.

One takeaway: “Our findings support earlier work suggesting social media may fuel ‘hormonophobia,’ or negative framing and scaremongering about hormonal contraception and that this phobia is largely driven by claims of personal experience rather than scientific evidence,” the authors write. “Within these hashtag categories, TikTok creators frame their provider interactions negatively. Many indicate feeling ignored or upset after medical appointments, not sufficiently informed about contraceptive options, and pressured to use hormonal contraceptives. This finding aligns with previous social media research and among the general population, suggesting opportunities for improvements in contraceptive counseling.”

Popular Contraception Videos on TikTok: An Assessment of Content Topics
Rachel E. Stoddard, et al. Contraception, January 2024.

The study: Researchers analyzed 700 English-language TikTok videos related to hormonal contraception, with a total of 1.2 billion views and 1.5 million comments, posted between October 2019 and December 2021. Their aim was to explore the types of contraception content on TikTok and to understand how the platform influences the information patients take into birth control counseling visits.

The findings: More than half of the videos (52%) were about patient experiences and how to use contraceptives. Other common topics included side effects (35%) and pregnancy (39%).

Only 19% of the videos were created by health care professionals, including midwives, physician assistants and medical doctors, although those videos garnered 41% of the total views, indicating higher engagement. While 93% of health care providers shared educational content, 23% of non-health care providers shared educational content.

One takeaway: “Our findings show an exceptional opportunity for education around contraception for young reproductive-aged individuals, given the accessibility and popularity of these videos. This may also extend to other topics around sex education and family planning, including sexually transmitted infection prevention and treatment and procuring abortion care,” the authors write.

TikTok, #IUD, and User Experience With Intrauterine Devices Reported on Social Media
Jenny Wu, Esmé Trahair, Megan Happ and Jonas Swartz. Obstetrics & Gynecology, January 2023.

The study: Researchers used a web-scraping application to collect the top 100 TikTok videos tagged #IUD on April 6, 2022, based on views, comments, likes and shares. Their aim was to understand the perspectives and experiences of people with IUDs shared on TikTok. The videos had a total of 471 million views, 32 million likes and 1 million shares. Their average length was 33 seconds.

The findings: Some 89% of the creators identified as female and nearly 90% were from the United States; 37% were health care professionals; and 78% were 21 years or older.

Video types included patients’ own experiences with IUD removal (32%), educational (30%) and humorous (25%). More videos (38%) had a negative tone compared with 19% with a positive tone. The videos that portrayed negative user experiences emphasized pain and distrust of health care professionals.

Half of the videos were very accurate, while nearly a quarter were inaccurate (the authors did not use the term misinformation).

One takeaway: “The most liked #IUD videos on TikTok portray negative experiences related to pain and informed consent. Awareness of this content can help health care professionals shape education given the high prevalence of TikTok use among patients,” the authors write. “TikTok differs from other platforms because users primarily engage with an algorithmically curated feed individualized to the user’s interests and demographics.”

Types of female birth control

Most female hormonal contraceptives contain the synthetic version of natural female hormones estrogen and progesterone. They affect women’s hormone levels, preventing mature eggs from being released by the ovaries, a process that’s known as ovulation, hence, preventing a possible pregnancy.

Of the two hormones, progesterone (called progestin in synthetic form) is primarily responsible for preventing pregnancy. In addition to playing a role in preventing ovulation, progesterone inhibits sperm from penetrating through the cervix. Estrogen inhibits the development of follicles in the ovaries.

The information below is sourced from the CDC, the National Library of Medicine, the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic.

Intrauterine contraception

Also called Long-Acting Reversible Contraception, or LARC, this method works by thickening the cervical mucus so the sperm can’t reach an egg. There are two types of IUDs: hormonal and non-hormonal.

• Levonorgestrel intrauterine system is a T-shaped device that’s placed inside the uterus by a doctor. It releases a small amount of progestin daily to prevent pregnancy. It can stay in place for 3 to 8 years. Its failure rate is 0.1% to 0.4%.
• Copper T intrauterine device is also T-shaped and is placed inside the uterus by a doctor. It does not contain hormones and can stay in place for up to 10 years. Its failure rate is 0.8%.
• Side effects: Copper IUDs may cause more painful and heavy periods, while progestin IUDs may cause irregular bleeding. In the very rare cases of pregnancy while having an IUD, there’s a greater chance of an ectopic pregnancy, which is when a fertilized egg grows outside of the uterus.

Hormonal methods

• The implant is a single, thin rod that’s inserted under the skin of the upper arm. It releases progestin over 3 years. Its failure rate is 0.1%, making it the most effective form of contraception available.
• Side effects: The most common side effect of an implant is irregular bleeding.
• The injection Depo-Provera or “shot” or “Depo” delivers progestin in the buttocks or arms every three months at the doctor’s office. Its failure rate is 4%.
• Side effects: The shot may cause irregular bleeding. The shot is also the only contraceptive that may cause weight gain. It may also be more difficult to predict when fertility returns once the shot is stopped.
• Combined oral contraceptives or “the pill” contain estrogen and progestin. They’re prescribed by a doctor. The pill has to be taken at the same time daily. The pill is not recommended for people who are older than 35 and smoke, have a history of blood clots or breast cancer. Its failure rate is 7%. Among women aged 15 to 44 who use contraception, about 25% use the pill.
• The skin patch is worn on the lower abdomen, buttocks or upper body, releasing progestin and estrogen. It is prescribed by a doctor. A new patch is used once a week for three weeks. No patch is worn for the fourth week. Its failure rate is 7%.
• Hormonal vaginal contraceptive ring releases progestin and estrogen. It’s placed inside the vagina. It is worn for three weeks and taken out on the fourth week. Its typical failure rate is 7%.
• Side effects: Contraceptives with estrogen, including the pill, the patch and the ring, increase the risk of developing blood clots.
• Progestin-only pill or “mini-pill” only has progestin and is prescribed by a doctor. It has to be taken daily at the same time. It may be a good option for women who can’t take estrogen. Its typical failure rate is 7%.
• Opill is the first over-the-counter daily oral contraceptive in the U.S., approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2023. Opill only has progestin and like other birth control pills, it has to be taken at the same time every day. It should not be used by those who have or have had breast cancer. Its failure rate is 7%.
• Side effects: The most common side effect of progestin-only pills is irregular bleeding, although the bleeding tends to be light.

Non-hormonal birth control methods include using barriers such as a diaphragm or sponge, condoms and spermicides, withdrawal, and menstrual cycle tracking. Emergency contraception, including emergency contraception pills (the morning-after pill), is not a regular method of birth control.

Additional research studies to consider

Population Attitudes Toward Contraceptive Methods Over Time on a Social Media Platform
Allison A. Merz, et al. American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, December 2020.

Social Media and the Intrauterine Device: A YouTube Content Analysis
Brian T. Nguyen and Allison J. Allen. BMJ Sexual and Reproductive Health, November 2017.

The post How influencers and content creators discuss birth control on social media: What research shows appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Uri Simonsohn is an outspoken advocate for open science — adding transparency to the research process and helping researchers share what they’ve learned in greater detail with a broad audience.

Many people know Simonsohn for his data analyses on Data Colada, a blog about social science research he writes with two other behavioral scientists, Leif Nelson and Joseph Simmons. The three scholars, who co-direct the Wharton Credibility Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, occasionally use the blog to spotlight evidence of suspected fraud they’ve found in academic papers.

In his role at the Credibility Lab and as a professor at Esade Business School in Barcelona, Simonsohn travels to speak on issues around scientific integrity and data science. During his recent visit to Harvard University, The Journalist’s Resource asked for his thoughts on how journalists can improve their coverage of academic fraud and misconduct.

Here are three big takeaways from our conversation.

1. Before covering academic studies, ask researchers about preregistration.

Preregistration is “the practice of documenting your research plan at the beginning of your study and storing that plan in a read-only public repository such as OSF Registries or the National Library of Medicine’s Clinical Trials Registry,” according to the nonprofit Center for Open Science. Simonsohn says preregistration helps prevent research fraud. When researchers create a permanent record outlining how they intend to conduct a study before they start, they are discouraged from changing parts of their study — for instance, their hypothesis or study sample — to get a certain result.

Simonsohn adds that preregistration also reduces what’s known as “p-hacking,” or manipulating an analysis of data to make it seem as though patterns in the data are statistically significant when they are not. Examples of p-hacking: Adding more data or control variables to change the result or deciding after the analysis is complete to exclude some data. (For more on statistical significance, read our tip sheet on the topic.)

Preregistration is particularly important when researchers will be collecting their own data, Simonsohn points out. It’s easier to alter or fabricate data when you collect it yourself, especially if there’s no expectation to share the raw data.

While preregistration is the norm in clinical trials, it’s less common in other research fields. About half of psychology research is preregistered as is about a quarter of marketing research, Simonsohn says. A substantial proportion of economic research is not, however, because it often relies on data collected by other researchers or nonprofit organizations and government agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau.

Simonsohn urges journalists to ask researchers whether they preregistered their studies before reporting on them. He likened reporting on research that isn’t preregistered to driving a car that hasn’t been inspected. The car might be perfectly safe, but you can’t be sure because no one has had a chance to look under the hood.

“If the person says ‘no,’ [the journalist] could ask, ‘Oh, how come?’” he says. “And if they don’t provide a compelling reason, the journalist could say ‘You know, I’m not going to cover work that hasn’t been preregistered, without a good rationale.’”

Research registries themselves can be a helpful resource for journalists. The Center for Open Science lets the public search for and read the thousands of preregistered research plans on its Open Science Framework platform. Researchers who preregister their work at AsPredicted, a platform Simonsohn helped create for the Wharton Credibility Lab, can choose whether and when to make their preregistered research plan public.

2. Report on the lack of oversight of research data collection.

Journalists and the public probably don’t realize how little oversight there is when it comes to collecting and analyzing data for research, Simonsohn says. That includes research funded by the federal government, which gives colleges, universities and other organizations billions of dollars a year to study public health, climate change, new technology and other topics.

Simonsohn says there’s no system in place to ensure the integrity of research data or its analysis. Although federal law requires research involving human subjects to be reviewed by an Institutional Review Board, the primary goal of these independent committees is protecting the welfare and rights of study participants.

Academic papers are reviewed by a small group of experts before a scholarly journal will publish them. But the peer-review process isn’t designed to catch research fraud. Reviewers typically do not check the authors’ work to see if they followed the procedures they say they followed to reach their conclusions.

Simonsohn says journalists should investigate the issue and report on it.

“The lack of protection against fraud is a story that deserves to be written,” he says. “When I teach students, they’re shocked. They’re shocked that when you submit a paper to a journal, [the journal is] basically trusting you without any safeguards. You’re not even asked to assert in the affirmative that you haven’t done anything wrong.”

Journalists should also examine ways to prevent fraud, he adds. He thinks researchers should be required to submit “data receipts” to organizations that provide grant funding to show who has had access to, changed or analyzed a study’s raw data and when. This record keeping would be similar to the chain of custody process that law enforcement agencies follow to maintain the legal integrity of the physical evidence they collect.  

“That is, by far, the easiest way to stop most of it,” Simonsohn says.

3. Learn about open science practices and the scientists who expose problematic research.

Nearly 200 countries have agreed to follow the common standards for open science that UNESCO, the United Nations’ scientific, educational and cultural organization, created in 2021. In December, UNESCO released a status report of initiatives launched in different parts of the globe to help researchers work together in the open and share what they’ve learned in detail with other researchers and the public. The report notes, for example, that a rising number of countries and research organizations have developed open data policies.

As of January 2024, more than 1,100 open science policies were adopted by research organizations and research funders worldwide, according to the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies, which tracks policies requiring researchers to make their “research output” public.

In the U.S., the universities and university departments that have adopted these policies include Johns Hopkins University, University of Central Florida, Stanford University’s School of Education and Columbia University’s School of Social Work. Such policies also have been adopted at Harvard Kennedy School and one of its research centers, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, which is where The Journalist’s Resource is housed.

Simonsohn recommends journalists learn about open science practices and familiarize themselves with research watchdogs such as Nick Brown, known for helping expose problems in published studies by prominent nutrition scientist Brian Wansink.

Retraction Watch, a website that tracks research retractions, maintains a list of more than two dozen scientific sleuths. Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and science integrity consultant who has been called “the public face of image sleuthing,” was a guest speaker in The Journalist’s Resource’s recent webinar on covering research fraud and errors.

Here are some of the open science organizations that journalists covering these issues will want to know about:

• The Virginia-based Center for Open Science.
• The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences.
• Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) Project, an online platform for sharing clinical trial research data.
• VEDA (Visualization, Exploration, and Data Analysis), NASA’s open-source platform that allows researchers to collaborate on Earth science studies.
• MedRxiv (pronounced “med-archive”) is an online platform owned and operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Researchers can use it to share preprint research — academic papers that present preliminary findings and have not been peer reviewed — on medical, clinical and health science topics.

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This journalism tip sheet on covering guns in the U.S., originally published in October 2018, was updated on May 3, 2024 with new data and links to more recent research and reports.

It’s crucial that journalists reporting on guns get the details right, down to the type and style of firearm involved. When news outlets make mistakes, audiences can view their work as sloppy or, worse, as an effort to mislead. Regardless, when the news media get facts wrong, audiences — especially gun owners — might not trust the information they provide.

Although gun ownership is common in the U.S., it remains one of the country’s most divisive issues. About 40% of U.S. adults say they live in a gun-owning household, according to a national survey the Pew Research Center conducted in June 2023. About 12% of women and 33% of men personally own firearms, researchers estimate in a paper published in the journal Injury Prevention in 2020.

To help reporters avoid errors when reporting on guns, The Journalist’s Resource teamed up with two journalists with lots of experience covering them. We thank Henry Pierson Curtis, who covered gun and drug trafficking and other crime at the Orlando Sentinel for 25 years before retiring in 2016, and Alex Yablon, who reported on the business side of guns and gun policy for about five years at The Trace, for helping create this tip sheet.

Here are seven things journalists should keep in mind when reporting on guns:

1. People who die in mass shootings represent a small fraction of the number who die from gun injuries in the U.S.

In 2022, 48,204 people died from injuries caused by firearms, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most gun deaths — 56% in 2022 — are suicides. Almost 41% of people killed by guns in 2022 were homicide victims.

2. Most guns made in the U.S. are handguns. 

While AR-15-style rifles get a lot of media attention, most firearms made in this country are handguns. In 2022, gun companies manufactured 6.2 million pistols and 830,786 revolvers, data from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives show. In comparison, nearly 3.6 million rifles and 662,350 shotguns were manufactured that year.

“There are just so many handguns out there,” Yablon says. “That has really been the story of America’s love of guns. There have been many, many AR-15s and AK-47s sold in the past 10 or 15 years, but there have been far more handguns sold.”

Of the nearly 2 million guns that U.S. law enforcement agencies recovered during crime investigations and performed traces on between 2017 and 2021, 79% were pistols or revolvers, according to the federal government’s most recent “National Firearms Commerce and Trafficking Assessment” report, released in February 2023.

A paper published in 2021 in the journal Injury Epidemiology identifies the specific brands and models of guns U.S. adults own.

3. Expect pushback from gun enthusiasts if you call an AR-15 an “assault rifle.”

An assault rifle, by some definitions, is a military firearm capable of fully automatic fire, meaning it can fire without pause until empty. AR-15-style guns are semi-automatic, meaning they fire a bullet for each pull of the trigger.

It’s worth pointing out that the “AR” in AR-15 doesn’t stand for assault rifle or automatic rifle. It comes from ArmaLite, the name of the company that developed that rifle style.

Organizations such as the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a firearms industry trade association, refer to AR-15-style guns as modern sporting rifles and warn against confusing them with military rifles such as the M-16. “These rifles are used by hunters, competitors, millions of Americans seeking home-defense guns and many others who simply enjoy going to the range,” the organization explains on its website.

The Associated Press updated its Stylebook in July 2022 with new guidance on weapon terms. It suggests newsrooms use the term “semi-automatic rifle” when referring to a rifle that fires once for each trigger pull and reloads automatically. “Avoid assault rifle and assault weapon, which are highly politicized terms that generally refer to AR- or AK-style rifles designed for the civilian market, but convey little meaning about the actual functions of the weapon,” AP recommends.

4. When writing about guns, it’s helpful to refer to the make and model to avoid confusion and errors.

“I would suggest that if you’re writing about a particular crime … ask whatever law enforcement agency is involved for the make and model for the gun used in the crime,” Yablon says. “That’s going to be the easiest way to avoid tripping up on any of these things.”

Curtis suggests that reporters covering crime and court beats take a gun safety course to learn some of the basic terminology. “I took the concealed carry [class] twice at the Sentinel,” he says. “That starts exposing reporters … to people who are very familiar with firearms. They [instructors] can be very arrogant, but they’re people who can help you out.”

5. All automatic weapons are not banned in the U.S.

Under the National Firearms Act, civilians cannot own fully automatic weapons made after May 19, 1986. But adults  who pass a federal background check and pay a $200 tax can legally purchase older automatic weapons, provided they also register them with the Secretary of the Treasury.

There are a limited number of those guns available, though, and they’re expensive, Curtis explains. “For a fully automatic M-16, you might pay $15,000,” he says. “Typically, it’s going to be stuff from World War II — German Schmeissers, stuff like that. Old Thompson submachine guns. That’s a good down payment on a nice house.”

As of May 2021, a total of 741,146 machine guns were registered with the federal government. The five states with the largest number of registered machine guns were Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Texas and Virginia.

6. There’s a difference between a bullet and a cartridge.

A bullet is the metal projectile that leaves the barrel of a gun when fired. The bullet, along with the case, primer and propellant, make up the cartridge that goes into the gun. It is incorrect to say “box of bullets” when you actually mean a “box of cartridges” or “box of ammunition.”

Keep in mind that shotguns use a different kind of ammunition. Shotgun shells contain either shot, which are metal pellets, or a slug, a projectile that can be made of various materials such as rubber or metal.

7. Silencers don’t make guns silent.

A suppressor — also known as a silencer — can be attached to the end of a gun barrel to reduce the dangerously loud sound of gunfire. But a suppressor doesn’t make gunfire silent.

You can find videos on YouTube of people using silencers and see for yourself.

For journalists wanting to learn more:

• We’ve gathered academic research examining how journalists portray gun owners in news stories.
• Poynter’s Al Tompkins created this guide in 2012: “What Journalists Need to Know about Guns and Gun Control.”
• This guide, created by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, includes a glossary of gun-related terms. It lists examples of what it considers inaccurate and misleading news coverage and offers suggestions for improvement. Even if journalists disagree with the opinions presented, there’s value in seeing how other organizations interpret their work.
• Patent and trademark attorney Bennet Langlotz, whose clients include firearms manufacturers, wrote “The Journalists’ Guide to Guns (How Not to Look Like an Idiot When Writing About Firearms).”

If you’re writing about guns, you should know about these groups and government agencies:

• The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is the primary regulator of firearms. It provides a variety of data, including firearms trace data and a listing of licensed firearms manufacturers, dealers, collectors and importers.
• The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks violent deaths, including gun-related deaths. Its National Center for Injury Prevention collects information on firearm injuries and death.
• The National Rifle Association is a pro-gun lobby organization and leading provider of civilian firearms education.
• The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and Coalition to Stop Gun Violence are advocacy organizations fighting to reduce gun-related deaths and injuries.

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A common complaint I hear from researchers is that journalists make a lot of mistakes when they report on academic studies. They often describe study findings incorrectly, for example, or claim that a new paper proves something when it doesn’t.

I’ve written dozens of tip sheets in recent years to help journalists fine-tune their skills in choosing, vetting, understanding and explaining research as part of their reporting process. This tip sheet, however, is for researchers, who also play a role in helping journalists get it right.

Our main goal at The Journalist’s Resource is bridging the gap between newsrooms and academia to ensure news coverage of public policy issues is grounded in high-quality evidence — peer-reviewed research in particular.  Everyone benefits when journalists report accurately on research findings, especially the everyday folks who make decisions about their health and safety and their children’s futures based on that information.

When I speak to groups of researchers about the best ways to build relationships with journalists, I often share these 10 tips with them. They represent some of the many ways researchers can help the news media avoid errors, starting with the journalists who interview them about their own work.

1. Use plain language.

Many journalists haven’t studied research methods or statistics and often don’t fully understand the technical terms researchers use to communicate with one another about their work. That’s why it’s important to use plain language when discussing the details of a research paper.

For example, instead of saying you found a positive association between air pollution and dementia in older adults, say you found that older adults exposed to higher levels of air pollution are more likely to develop dementia.

Another example: Instead of saying there’s heterogeneity in the results of three experiments, you could say the trials produced different results.

2. Make sure any press releases written about your research are accurate.

When journalists cover research, they sometimes look to press releases for guidance in describing research findings and to double-check key names, facts and figures. Unfortunately, the press releases that higher education institutions and research organizations issue to promote their researchers’ work sometimes contain errors.

When possible, review the final version of a press release about your research before it’s shared with news outlets. If you spot problems after it’s distributed, ask for a correction and note the error in the initial press release when speaking with journalists.

3. Offer examples of the right and wrong ways to explain relationships among the key variables that were studied.

Not all journalists know what causal language is, or when they should and shouldn’t use it to describe the relationship between key variables in a research study. When speaking with a journalist about a study’s findings, point out whether there’s evidence of a causal relationship between or among certain variables. If there isn’t, offer the journalist examples of correct and incorrect ways to explain this relationship

An example: Let’s say a study finds that crime rates increased in 10 cities in 2020 immediately after local police departments implemented a new crime-fighting program. Let’s also say researchers found no evidence that this new program caused crime rates to rise.

A researcher discussing these findings with a journalist could help them avoid errors by explicitly pointing out the right and wrong ways to report on them. In this case, tell the reporter it would be inaccurate to say this study finds that this program causes crime rates to rise, might cause crime rates to rise or leads to higher crime. It also would be inaccurate to say that introducing this program contributed to higher crime rates in those 10 cities in 2020.

Then share examples of accurate ways to describe what the authors of the study learned: They discovered a relationship, correlation or link between this new program and increased crime rates in these specific cities in this one year. However, researchers found no evidence that the program caused, led to or contributed to the increase.

4. Note the generalizability of findings.

Many news stories and news headlines overgeneralize study findings, reporting that the findings apply to a much larger group than they actually do. Researchers can help journalists get it right by noting how generalizable a study’s findings are.

Example: Let’s say an academic paper concludes that 25% of student athletes at public universities in one state reported using marijuana during the past year. A researcher doing an interview about this study could help ensure the journalist reports on it accurately by stressing that the findings apply only to student athletes at these specific universities. It would be helpful to also point out that it would be incorrect to insinuate these findings apply or might apply to other types of students or to student athletes at any other higher education institution.

5. If a study’s results are expressed as standard deviations, be prepared to help journalists explain those findings using common measurements the public will understand.

A lot of journalists will need assistance describing results reported as standard deviations. Mainstream news outlets will generally avoid the term in news stories because it’s unfamiliar to the general public. Also, even when it’s explained using plain language, the concept can be difficult for even the most educated audience members to grasp.

One way to help audiences comprehend results expressed as a standard deviation, or SD, is by describing the results using more common units of measurement such as points, percentiles, dollars and years. Santiago Pinto, a senior economist and policy advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, does a good job explaining standard deviation changes in student test scores in his August 2023 report, “The Pandemic’s Effects on Children’s Education.”

The report looks at how U.S. eighth-grade students performed on the National Assessment of Educational Progress between 2019 and 2022. Pinto writes:

“What does a decline of 8 points in the NAEP math test mean? In math, one SD of individual student scores is about 40 points and is roughly equivalent, as a rule of thumb, to three years of schooling. The national average loss of 8 points is equivalent to 0.2 SD, which implies 0.6 years of schooling lost.”

6. Ask journalists to briefly summarize the key takeaways of your interview with them.

Doing this at the end of an interview is a good way to gauge how well a journalist understands the research so you can correct any errors and misunderstandings. Keep in mind, though, that journalists working on a tight deadline will have limited time to go over the key points of your conversation.

7. Offer to answer follow-up questions and review word choices.

At the end of an interview, invite journalists to contact you if they have additional questions, including questions about whether they’ve explained something correctly in their story. Journalists generally won’t share copies of their work before it runs — news outlets tend to discourage or prohibit it. But they might share a few sentences or paragraphs when they ask for help making sure there aren’t mistakes in those parts of the story.

Although they probably won’t share the direct quotes they plan to use from sources they’ve interviewed, some journalists will read your own quotes back to you. It’s worth asking about, and could be another way to prevent errors.

When you offer to answer follow-up questions, point out the best ways and times to reach you.

8. Provide examples of accurate news coverage and summaries.

You can also help a journalist check their work by sharing news stories, reports and summaries that correctly characterize the research the journalist is reporting on.

9. Share The Journalist’s Resource’s tip sheets.

You’ll find a link to our “Know Your Research” section on the right side of our homepage. We’ve created tip sheets, explainers and other resources to help journalists build research literacy and numeracy. Our tip sheets cover topics such as statistical significance, standard deviation, the purpose of peer review and how to interpret data from polls and surveys.

All our written materials are free. We publish them under a Creative Commons license so anyone anywhere can share and republish them as much as they like.

10. After the journalist’s story runs, give feedback.

Good journalists want to know if they got something wrong. They correct their mistakes and try to learn from them.

Too often, when researchers and others spot errors in news stories, they do not alert the journalist. If no one raises an issue with a news story, the journalist who reported it — and all the other journalists who will use it as a reference in the future — will assume it’s accurate.

If a journalist covers an academic paper well, they’ll want to hear about that, too. One way to let them know they got it right: Share their story on social media. Also, reach out with new research you think they’d be interested in reading.

The post 10 ways researchers can help journalists avoid errors when reporting on academic studies appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

In the face of increasing online harassment, an exploratory report published this month examines the role of peer support networks in reducing harm and increasing resilience among U.S. journalists, especially for women, journalists of color and LGBTQ+ journalists who are disproportionately targeted online.

“The Power of Peer Support,” published by PEN America, calls on the journalism industry to invest in creating peer support groups, modeled after evidence-based approaches in other high-stress professions like emergency services, where journalists under attack online can come together and find support.

The authors make the case that under the current industry pressures and without sufficient support, journalists, especially those from diverse backgrounds, will leave the profession.

“I genuinely see this as something that as an industry, especially if we come together, we can make work for journalists and for news organizations,” says Susan E. McGregor, one of the report’s authors and a research scholar at Columbia University Data Science Institute and a former journalist.

The report fills an important gap in knowledge about the existing structures of peer support networks inside and outside of the news industry, effective models from outside the industry that could be adopted, and journalists’ general views and needs for peer support.

In addition to McGregor, the report’s authors are Viktorya Vilk, the director of digital safety and free expression at PEN America, who has been focused on digital safety and online abuse defense for more than six years, and Jeje Mohamed, senior manager of digital safety and free expression at PEN America, a nonprofit organization that champions free expression and the freedom to write. The Democracy Fund and Craig Newmark Philanthropies funded the report.

The report is not published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, but the research behind it was approved by Columbia University’s Institutional Review Board. It is based on interviews with eight journalists of color and 17 support network organizers, newsroom leaders, and experts in peer support, mental health, HR and security, between March 2022 and June 2023.

Even though the authors interviewed eight journalists, they were able to gain a broader of view of journalists’ experience via peer support network organizers who have worked with many journalists in their groups.

The report’s findings aren’t generalizable to all journalists who have experienced online abuse, the authors note.

Despite its limitations, the report is a deep dive into peer support in journalism, says Matthew Pearson, an assistant professor at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication in Ottawa, Canada, who researches mental health, well-being and trauma among media workers and was not involved in the report.

“I appreciate how [the report] connects peer support to the consequences of online abuse, but I also really appreciate that it makes a link between online abuse and how that abuse impacts the very people that we’re trying to get and retain and promote in U.S. organizations,” Pearson says, referring to women, people of color and people from diverse backgrounds.

Scott Blanchard, an editor and director of journalism at WITF in Pennsylvania, who has extensive experience in bringing peer support and trauma awareness to local newsrooms, said in an email that the paper “is the first report I’ve seen to drill down this specifically on peer support for journalists, and the first I’ve seen to draw conclusions and make recommendations.”

The report comes at a crucial election year in the U.S. and at a time when journalists, particularly women, journalists of color and LGBTQ+ journalists, face increasing levels of online abuse and harassment.

A 2022 Pew Research Center study of 11,889 U.S.-based journalists finds that 27% of Black journalists, 20% of Hispanic journalists and 27% of Asian journalists experienced online abuse based on their race or ethnicity, compared with 5% of white journalists surveyed.

Many times journalists under attack don’t know where to turn or don’t have a place to turn to, leaving them feeling alone and isolated.

“If you look at the literature, social isolation is extremely, extremely bad for one’s health, particularly if you’re going through these kinds of high-stress experiences,” says McGregor.

Peer support and small-group peer support in journalism

The authors of the report define peer support as emotional and psychological support provided outside of a clinical setting.

Research shows that certain kinds of support, including peer support, can be more effective at promoting resilience than working with a new therapist, the authors note, although it’s not a replacement for therapy.

“We explored all kinds of support networks,” Vilk says. “Not all of the support networks that we found were peer support, and they were all extremely different from one another, and they did very different things,” such as anonymous hotlines that people can call, online chat groups, mentorship programs in professional associations, or in-person programs.

In their search for the types of support networks for journalists, the authors find two main types of programs:

• “Structured” networks, which were created with a specific mission, such as professional development or providing emergency response services.
• “Organic” networks, originating in communities such as alumni of a given training or fellowship program, or among journalists who share a beat.

But while many journalists are proponents of peer support networks, and prefer to receive support from other journalists, many don’t reach out to the existing ones when facing online harassment or other job stressors.

The authors find several reasons driving this disconnect. Some journalists are concerned that the details of their experiences or their feelings might find their way to an employer, potential employer or future collaborator. Others might find it difficult to be vulnerable without knowing how their experiences in a group might be received or responded to.

The authors believe that another model called small-group peer support, could be the solution.

The model currently doesn’t exist in the news industry, according to the authors, but it is beneficial in other high-stress professions, research shows.

In the small-group peer support model, a trained individual facilitates a group of four to ten peers in providing support to one another. The facilitators don’t necessarily share the experiences of the group and they don’t provide direct support to the group’s members.

“The small-group peer support model is built on norms and expectations defined and maintained by the individuals in the group, with support from trained facilitators who can offer guidance and direction as needed,” the authors write. “In the examples we’ve studied, small-group peer support operated in ‘real time’ (e.g. in-person meeting or online call), so participants could be confident that, when sharing, they would get a response.”

In the authors’ view, this model will likely work better for journalists if members are also given anonymity and confidentiality, It can also be a more inclusive space for freelance journalists who often lack support from news organizations, they say.

“Many initiatives that being in the newsroom begin with full-time, permanent employees in mind, or even employees who are on contract, and don’t necessarily consider freelancers,” Pearson of Carleton University says. “So I’m glad that this includes freelancers.”

The report suggests that professional associations, foundations, universities, unions, philanthropists or news organizations could spearhead the effort to develop networks, recruit peer support facilitators, coordinate training, help with finances, and help connect journalists with these groups.

“I would love to see as many organizations in the journalism industry as possible experiment with this model because small-group peer support has not been done in any kind of deliberate, structured, thoughtful way in the journalism industry that we were able to find,” Vilk says.

Blanchard of WITF is in support of the model but he’s also skeptical about how quickly and widely it could be adopted across the industry.

“I think there’s also a catch-22 here: Journalists and newsrooms are so stretched and stressed that they may not have the time and energy it would take to create a way to address how stretched and stressed they are,” Blanchard said. “That’s why the idea of philanthropic money could play a huge role in pushing this issue forward across the industry, including the model recommended by the report.”

Other findings in the report

The professional journalists interviewed for the report were based in the U.S., with staff and freelance experience on a range of beats and from two to 20 years in the field.

The authors recruited participants who identified as journalists of color, given the disproportionate impact of online harassment on them.

“We wanted to explicitly understand what kind of peer support exists for folks who are disproportionately targeted based on their identity,” Vilk says.

Six of the eight journalists identified as women, one as a man and one as nonbinary. The journalists worked at various mediums, including print, online and audio.

Even though the journalists interviewed described support networks as “safe spaces” that sometimes even took on a “familial” quality, “they said that they did not — or would not — turn to these networks when experiencing online harassment,” the authors write.

They also find that existing support networks mostly address either immediate distress — such as an active doxing campaign or threat of legal action — or career-level concerns, such as negotiating a raise. This leaves out journalists who experience ongoing distress such as online abuse.

The majority of support networks for journalists in the U.S. operate outside of news organizations, according to the report. However, they found four news organizations that ran in-house peer support networks or had explored the option.

In the in-house model, news organizations provide financial and logistics support to networks. Employees serve as peer support providers and an external clinician supervises the network. Although there are many benefits to this model, its exclusive nature to the newsroom makes it inaccessible to freelancers. Also, the expense of working with a clinical provider makes it infeasible for newsrooms with limited resources, the authors write.

When asked what they wanted from news organizations, most journalists in the report said they wanted their news organizations to “directly and explicitly acknowledge the occupational hazards of journalism, including online abuse, and to provide basic resources for coping with them constructively,” the authors write.

They also wanted news organizations to develop policies and procedures for online abuse, so that journalists know what to expect from their news organization, and said that employee assistance programs (EAPs) are not enough.

“I don’t think the journalism industry has fully come around to the idea the profession involves an enormous amount of stress and trauma and occupational hazard, the way that it is understood if you’re talking about first responders or other kinds of fields,” Vilk says.

Report’s recommendations for setting a peer support network

They offer several recommendations to news organizations and the wider journalism industry:

Strengthen existing organic or structured support networks. Some ways to do so include:

• Creating a “staffed” channel focused on online abuse, and recruiting and training members who can serve as support providers and offer specific hours of availability.
• Offering members training opportunities, such as psychological first aid; considering a compensation or recognition model for the trained support providers.
• Allowing support providers to take breaks from their duties to prevent burnout.
• Providing members with existing anti-abuse resources.
• And, importantly, emphasizing confidentiality and anonymity.

Build an in-house structured support network:

1. Set aside an hour or two per month during work hours for participants to connect and complete a support training program like psychological first aid.
   1. Get buy-in with the news organization’s leadership and potential participants. One way is to work with a trusted facilitator from inside or outside the news organization to collect anonymized staff experiences with online abuse and their desired interventions. This information can then help show the need.
   1. Assess your budget. “Think realistically about how your organization can provide support immediately, in terms of training time, administrative overhead, professional development, and other direct costs,” the authors write. Also, think about the cost of losing a staffer due to burnout.
   1. Connect with other organizations that have implemented peer support networks.
   1. Communicate within the organization consistently that the news organization wants to be more effective in supporting journalists experiencing online abuse and other job stressors, and that it has developed a support network where journalists can confidentially discuss their issues.

Adapt the small-group peer support model.

One example is peer support at Whitman-Walker Health, a nonprofit clinic in Washington, D.C., serving the local LGBTQ+ community. The clinic has been offering small-group peer support groups to the local LGBTQ+ community for many years.

A new group usually begins after the peer support coordinator identifies six to eight people interested in exploring a theme — such as the “Silver Circle” for LGBTQ+ seniors — and connects them with pairs of trained peer support facilitators, who help guide group conversations.

The groups are largely independent. Some have met consistently for years and some meet for just a few months.

Whitman-Walker peer support facilitators go through an application process and a nine-hour training. They also participate in sessions with more experienced supervisors. The typical time commitment of a peer support facilitator is four to five hours per month.

The organization suggested that journalists can form small-group peer support around beats, identities or locations.

“What you might say is, ‘Let’s have a six-session or eight-session group about dealing with small towns, or what’s it like being in a small town and knowing everybody?’ Or, ‘What’s it like being a woman of color [in journalism]?’” Whitman-Walker officials told the authors.

McGregor is now researching whether and how the small-group peer support model might work in the journalism community.

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U.S. lawmakers have introduced a flood of legislation to limit or eliminate colleges’ DEI initiatives, which are designed to improve diversity, equity and inclusion on campus. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s DEI Legislation Tracker, a total of 82 such bills have been filed in 28 states and Congress since early 2023.

Diversity, equity and inclusion are three closely linked values that, together, have become an umbrella term for efforts to ensure people from various backgrounds are included and supported. DEI programs at colleges and universities tend to focus on students, faculty and staff from groups that historically have been marginalized — for example, racial and religious minorities, military veterans and students who start college later in life.

Anti-DEI legislation often targets DEI offices or staff as well as schools’ diversity statements, training programs and policies on hiring and promoting employees and admitting students, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

To help journalists better understand what DEI is and how anti-DEI legislation could impact higher education nationwide, The Journalist’s Resource co-hosted a webinar March 28 with Harvard Kennedy School’s Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project.

If you missed it, you can watch the recording. Keep reading for five key takeaways based on presentations from:

• Kristen Renn, the Mildred B. Erickson Distinguished Chair and Professor of Higher, Adult, & Lifelong Education at Michigan State University and a former dean in Brown University’s Office of Student Life.
• Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project.
• Erica Licht, IARA’s research project director and co-host of the podcast Untying Knots.

1. A wide variety of student groups benefit directly from DEI initiatives.

“DEI efforts often get, particularly in some parts of the country, framed simply around race, sometimes around gender or sex,” Renn said.

She noted that framing is incomplete. In fact, two broad categories of students benefit directly from DEI initiatives: those with minoritized identities and those whose experiences are underrepresented on campus, she explained.

Minoritized students are from groups that historically have been marginalized, discriminated against and excluded from higher education based on race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability, Renn added.

Students whose experiences are underrepresented include neurodiverse students, students who are military veterans, first-generation college students, low-income students, students who returned to college later in life, international students and students who are raising children or caring for older adults.

2. Many colleges and universities have tried to incorporate DEI values across campus — from student housing, dining services and health care to coursework, academic advising and mentoring.

Institutions often use a variety of approaches across campus to promote DEI, including revising course syllabi so students study the work of diverse authors, and launching programs that celebrate or raise awareness about different cultures and world views. Ohio State University’s Native American and Indigenous Frybread Community Social and South Dakota State University’s World Languages and Cultures Film Festival are examples of such programs.

Many colleges and universities have created communities within student housing to make it easier for students of the same identity group — first-generation college students and transfer students, for instance — to find and support one another.

Hiring faculty and staff from different backgrounds also promotes DEI. Not only does it provide career opportunities for diverse groups of people, it allows students to seek help from academic advisers, mental health specialists, professors and other campus authorities who have similar life experiences.

Some DEI programs offer support and resources for specific identity groups, like Bristol Community College’s Women’s Center, the University of Georgia’s Pride Center and Duke University’s Her Garden, a mentoring program for female students of color.

3. Journalists reporting on anti-DEI legislation must familiarize themselves with academic research on the impacts of DEI in higher education.

In the webinar, Licht spotlighted several studies suggesting students who attend schools with DEI programs perform better academically, work better in teams and are more engaged in their classes. Meanwhile, Muhammad introduced the Race, Research & Policy Portal, a free online collection of research summaries created by the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project.

Muhammad stressed the need for journalists “to show extreme skepticism” for claims that critics of DEI make to justify anti-DEI legislation. Elected leaders and organizations that oppose DEI efforts often mischaracterize research findings on the topic or claim there’s no research to support the need for DEI at higher education institutions.

“Much of what is being blamed on DEI doesn’t actually have a basis in fact other than a few anecdotal examples, you know, of some terrible training models that went haywire,” Muhammad said.

He acknowledged that it’s difficult to know what programs are offered at each institution and how they’re working. Schools customize their programs to serve their own student populations.

“There are thousands of DEI offices around the country,” Muhammad said. “No one can actually know exactly what everyone is doing.”

4. Because of the number of people and institutions affected, curbing or eliminating DEI initiatives will have a bigger impact than banning race-based affirmative action in admissions.

Over the past year or so, politically conservative organizations and politicians have worked together to sway public opinion against DEI initiatives and push anti-DEI legislation, news outlets have reported. Earlier this year, The New York Times characterized the movement as a backlash against “wokeism.”

The focus on DEI has grown sharply since last summer, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions. The nation’s military academies are now the only higher education institutions that can consider race and ethnicity when selecting students.

That ruling will affect students at dozens of selective colleges and universities. Anti-DEI legislation, however, will have a significantly larger impact on American higher education, Renn said.

Race-based affirmative action policies have helped racial and ethnic minorities get into the most selective institutions, such as Ivy League schools. DEI initiatives, on the other hand, benefit a bunch of student groups across all types of colleges and universities.

Renn noted that anti-DEI bills target the institutions most U.S. college students attend — community colleges, state flagship universities and mid-tier public schools and universities. More than 10.2 million students — 35% of undergraduates nationwide — went to community colleges in the fall of 2021, according to a 2023 report from the U.S. Department of Education.

“It’s very important to talk about DEI as what’s happening on campuses,” Renn pointed out. “When politicians or legislators restrict curricula and campus climate efforts, that actually has a much greater harm than curtailing affirmative action in admissions.”

5. Journalists need to ask more probing questions about DEI efforts and higher education history.

Licht said journalists should delve more deeply into schools’ histories to better understand campus culture and the need for DEI programs.

“Journalists should be asking these questions of, does the university know its own history?” Licht said. “Do the people who work there know it?”

It’s also important, she added, to ask legislators and critics of DEI if they know how higher education institutions discriminated against, exploited or excluded certain groups of people well into the mid-20^th century.

Other questions worth exploring:

• Which initiatives work best for reaching the goals of diversity, equity and inclusion, according to peer-reviewed research?
• How will anti-DEI legislation affect historically Black colleges and universities?
• Could any anti-DEI bills infringe on student rights protected under Title IX, the federal law that prohibits colleges and universities from discriminating against students based on their sex?
• How does the amount of money an institution spends on DEI efforts compare with the amount of money it loses on other programs, including student athletics?
• What disparities have existed among different student groups over the past decade? For example, how do students compare in terms of graduation rates, debt accumulation and job placement? If DEI efforts are prohibited, how will schools address disparities?
• How should the perspectives and experiences of women, students of color and LGBTQ students shape campus policies and practices?

Further reading

• Last month, the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center released the 62-page report, “Truths About DEI on College Campuses: Evidence-Based Expert Responses to Politicized Misinformation.”
• Check out our tip sheet on covering race-based affirmative action. Although affirmative action is prohibited in nearly all college admissions offices, many of these tips will help journalists report on issues around college admissions and student diversity more broadly.
• Our collection of research on race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action examines colleges’ efforts to diversify enrollment when admissions officials cannot take students’ race or ethnicity into account.

This tip sheet was updated for clarification on April 4, 2024.

The post Reporting on DEI in higher education: 5 key takeaways from our webinar appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

New York Times investigative reporter Hannah Dreier wanted to know what happened to the hundreds of thousands of migrant children who came to the U.S. alone in recent years through the country’s southern border. Most sought to escape extreme poverty in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

In her five-part series, “Alone and Exploited,” Dreier demonstrates how a long chain of government failures and willful ignorance allowed this “new economy of exploitation” to grow and thrive.

“This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century,” she writes in the first story in the series, published in February 2023.

“Companies ignore the young faces in their back rooms and on their factory floors. Schools often decline to report apparent labor violations, believing it will hurt children more than help. And [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] behaves as if the migrant children who melt unseen into the country are doing just fine.”

The series also reveals:

• More than 250,000 migrant children arrived alone in the U.S. in 2021 and 2022, a sharp increase over prior years. As emergency shelters ran out of room, the federal government pressed case managers to work faster to place kids in private homes and loosened some restrictions to make vetting sponsors easier.
• The U.S. government lost track of many migrant children shortly after they left the shelters. “While H.H.S. [the Department of Health and Human Services] checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors, data obtained by The Times showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children,” Dreier writes in the first story in the series. “Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children.”
• Federal officials missed or overlooked warnings signs about child labor violations, including reports from social workers about dangerous working conditions and reports from the U.S. Department of Labor outlining evidence of child labor trafficking.
• Private audits ordered by several big companies consistently missed child labor violations. “Children were overlooked by auditors who were moving quickly, leaving early or simply not sent to the part of the supply chain where minors were working, The Times found in audits performed at 20 production facilities used by some of the nation’s most recognizable brands,” Dreier writes in the last article in the series, published in December 2023.

Federal and state officials responded quickly to Dreier’s reporting by changing laws, strengthening programs and overhauling some federal agencies. Days after the first story ran, President Joe Biden’s administration announced a crackdown on child labor exploitation. Congress and the Department of Labor launched their own investigations.

Meanwhile, many major companies, including McDonald’s, Costco and PepsiCo, announced their own reforms aimed eliminating child labor across their supply chains, Dreier reported in February 2024.

I interviewed Dreier to learn more about her series and the database she created to ground her coverage. Dreier, who is on maternity leave, answered my five questions by email.

In the short Q&A below, she discusses the database, which contains key details the federal government collected on more than 550,000 migrant children from January 2015 through May 2023, and why The New York Times chose to make it public. Dreier also offers tips to help other journalists use the anonymized data to report on migrant children and labor issues in their states and communities.

Her responses have been lightly edited to match The Journalist’s Resource’s editorial style.

Denise-Marie Ordway: Why did you create this database and how did it help you report out the series?

Hannah Dreier: This was a story that focused on people and on-the-ground reporting, but it started with data. I started out in early 2022 with a question: What happened to the hundreds of thousands of young people who were crossing the southern border by themselves?

I knew from years of immigration reporting that some of these children ended up working industrial jobs. But little was known about the startling scope of child labor throughout the United States, or the industry and governmental failures that have allowed it to thrive.

My first, and largest, hurdle was figuring out how to find children in this hidden workforce. The government provides shelter to children when they arrive, but after releasing them to sponsors, it doesn’t track them further. To find where children were working, I had to develop a new approach to analyzing federal data.

I quickly realized that children released to distant relatives and strangers were the most likely to be put to work. So I filed multiple FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests with the Department of Health and Human Services — and eventually sued them in federal court. I was able to obtain ZIP code-level data showing where children had been released to these nonparent sponsors. I then overlaid this data with U.S. Census population-density data to pinpoint parts of the country with especially high concentrations of children living far from their close relatives.

The resulting database guided two years of reporting across 13 states.

The data pointed to spots I never would have thought of: Flandreau, South Dakota; Parksley, Virginia; Bozeman, Montana. I started visiting these towns for weeks at a time, embedding in schools, and accompanying families to weddings and quinceañeras. I sat in factory parking lots during the midnight shift change and waited outside day labor sites before dawn. I found town after town where migrant child labor was an open secret.

Ordway: What made you decide to make this data public? Should more journalists and news outlets do this?

Dreier: Yes! And I hope more reporters use this data to dig into migrant child labor in America.

After I wrote a Times Insider piece explaining my process for mapping migrant child labor, Congressional staffers, academics, other journalists and even Department of Labor investigators requested access to our database. As part of its commitment to exposing the full scope of child labor, The Times made this data public, along with a detailed map that outlined outcomes for more than 550,000 children over a period of eight years.

We found migrant child labor in all 50 states. It’s clear there’s more to this story than what one journalist or even a team of reporters can report.

Ordway: How do you recommend other journalists use this database?

Dreier: Journalists at different outlets around the country have already picked up on some child labor stories, and this data can help them tell new stories. For local reporters, the database provides a previously unavailable level of detail about migrant children, including where kids are coming from, how long they’re staying in government-run shelters, and what kind of relationships they have with their sponsors (if they’re being released to aunts and uncles, distant cousins, strangers, etc.).

It’s been great to see reporters starting to use the database to fuel their own reporting, including at The Cincinnati Enquirer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Ordway: What advice would you give other journalists who’d like to create databases for their own reporting projects?

Dreier: Though the heart of this reporting was the stories of the children themselves, I used data to add sweep and bring home to readers just how widespread this problem has become.

We found useful data everywhere. It doesn’t always take a federal lawsuit to shake it loose. We used court records from PACER [the federal Public Access to Court Electronic Records system] and state courts, as well as documents from dozens of FOIA requests to the Department of Labor and state labor agencies to hunt down outcomes the government does not track.

We built a database of migrant children killed on the job, including a 15-year-old who fell on his first day roofing and a 14-year-old who was hit by a car while delivering food.

Another database showed how rarely the government prosecuted child labor trafficking cases. I also tracked serious workplace injuries suffered by children, including crushed limbs and seared lungs.

A lot of data is sitting there for the taking, and doesn’t require submitting any requests at all. I’d encourage reporters to spend time on the websites of the agencies they’re reporting on — for me, that was OSHA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration], DOL [the Department of Labor], HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services], SEC [the Securities and Exchange Commission], and CBP [Customs and Border Protection].

I also found it helpful to try site searches of these websites (by adding “site:hhs.gov” to Google searches for example), and to add the search term .csv or .xlsx, because some databases are posted to the site but not listed anywhere.

Ordway: When you ask government agencies for data such as this, how do you make sure you receive it in a form that you can easily use for reporting purposes?

Dreier: I always ask FOIA officers to email me records and to send data as a spreadsheet, but government offices often ignore that request.

With this project, some state agencies and police departments would send records only in hard copy or on CDs.

HHS gave us thousands of rows of data in the form of poorly rendered PDFs. We resolved this issue by scanning hundreds of pages of documents, and then using online tools to convert them to searchable text and spreadsheets.

For me, the most important thing is to get the records. From there, it’s almost always possible to find some way to make them useable … even if it ends up being a time-consuming process.

Read the stories

Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.

As Migrant Children Were Put to Work, U.S. Ignored Warnings

The Kids on the Night Shift

Children Risk Their Lives Building America’s Roofs

They’re Paid Billions to Root Out Child Labor in the U.S. Why Do They Fail?

The post How they did it: The New York Times exposes migrant child labor exploitation across 50 states appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

“For over 20 years, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been treated to luxury vacations by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.

He goes on cruises in far-flung locales on Crow’s yacht, flies on his private jet and keeps company with Crow’s powerful friends at the billionaire’s private resort.

The extent of Crow’s largesse has never been revealed. Until now.

-Lede to “Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire,” by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

In April 2023, ProPublica published the first story in its investigative series exposing a lack of ethics oversight for U.S. Supreme Court justices, some of whom received expensive gifts and worldwide vacations from well-heeled individuals — which meant private access to justices for those wealthy benefactors and their friends. The series provided rare, behind-the-scenes details of those interactions and prompted historic reforms on the nation’s high court.

The series begins covering the personal relationship between Justice Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, a real estate billionaire Thomas met three decades ago, according to ProPublica reporters Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski.

Those trips meant Thomas was in contact with powerful corporate executives, including from Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers, and political activists, such as “Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society leader regarded as an architect of the Supreme Court’s recent turn to the right,” the reporters write.

“By accepting the trips, Thomas has broken long-standing norms for judges’ conduct, ethics experts and four current or retired federal judges said,” the reporters write.

Crucially, those trips were not listed among Thomas’ annual financial disclosures, even though gifts worth over $415 usually must be reported, the reporters found. Despite such disclosure rules, before the ProPublica investigation the Supreme Court did not have a formal ethical code of conduct.

The private jet flights and yacht trips in particular should have been disclosed, the investigation finds. Thomas’ “failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts,” according to two ethics experts the reporters spoke with.

Crow “has denied trying to influence the justice but has said he extended hospitality to him just as he has to other dear friends,” the reporters write.

Among other findings from the investigation:

• Crow paid for boarding school tuition running more than $6,000 a month for a boy Thomas said he was raising “as a son.” According to a former school administrator, “Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student here, which was about a year,” the reporters write.
• A July 2008 “luxury fishing vacation” Justice Samuel Alito took with GOP billionaire Paul Singer, ProPublica reports, who paid for Alito’s private jet and whose firm later had cases before the Supreme Court. Alito did not report the jet flight in annual disclosures, according to the investigation.
• Alito’s lodging during that trip was covered by Robin Arkley II, owner of a mortgage company who had “recently acquired the fishing lodge,” the reporters write. Alito did not report the lodging in annual disclosures, they found.
• Thomas attended two donor summits hosted by the Koch network, the political organization founded by billionaires Charles and David Koch, which put Thomas in “the extraordinary position of having helped a political network that has brought multiple cases before the Supreme Court,” the reporters write.
• Crow and wife Kathy paid for a 7-foot-tall bronze statue of Thomas’ eighth-grade teacher, unveiled at an October 2021 ceremony in a New York City suburb at which Thomas spoke.

As a result of the yearlong investigation:

• The Senate Judiciary Committee last May held a full hearing on Supreme Court ethics reform and, in November, subpoenaed Leo and Crow to obtain information.
• The Supreme Court adopted its first-ever code of conduct in November 2023.
• Nonpartisan ethics watchdogs, including the Campaign Legal Center and the Project on Government Oversight, have called on the Department of Justice to investigate Thomas for failing to disclose the trips Crow provided.
• Another 40-plus watchdog groups have called for Thomas and Alito to recuse themselves from cases relating to big-time political donors. The justices have rejected such recusal.

For Kaplan, Elliott and Mierjeski, a big takeaway from the investigation is that courts at all levels need more scrutiny from journalists.

“One of the lessons of this has been that the courts are just totally under-covered as an institution, both at the federal level all the way down to local and state [levels],” Elliott says. “One piece of advice would just be to start adding judges and courts, at whatever the relevant level is, to the mental list of things that should be covered.”

Here are seven more tips for covering courts the ProPublica reporters shared with The Journalist’s Resource.

1. Think of a public figure’s entourage as a huge source pool.

It takes a village to move a public figure from point A to point B.

“It’s not like a normal person going on a trip to Europe or something,” Elliott says.

This is especially true if the public figure travels on private planes and boats, which require specialized crew to operate. For example, Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, often operates with a staff of a couple dozen, the ProPublica reporters found.

“We decided to try to talk to some of those people,” Elliott says. “So we started just sort of cold calling.”

2. Being an outsider can be an advantage, but be ready to play a ‘numbers game’ with cold calls.  

Kaplan says there are “extremely talented court reporters” with well-connected sources who focus on explaining Supreme Court decisions — but the ProPublica reporting team “did not start with any sources at all,” he says.

That wasn’t necessarily a detriment. To a reporter who regularly covers Supreme Court decisions, the staff of a yacht a Supreme Court justice had boarded might not have much to offer. But it was those seemingly tertiary sources, not directly involved with the regular functioning of the court, who were critical to telling the story of who the justices were spending time with while off the bench.

“We had to kind of start from scratch and get creative with the sort of people we were talking to,” Kaplan says. “We were talking almost exclusively to people that were very far removed from Washington, very far removed from the halls of national politics. And that brought us, over the course of the year, to some kind of relatively novel places.”

Those service workers — on the yacht, at the Adirondacks resort, at the Alaskan fishing lodge and other places — were “the absolute backbone of this,” Kaplan says. “It wasn’t a situation where any one person had the keys to the castle and were able to tell us everything that had happened, but a lot of people had some really valuable piece of the puzzle.”

Kaplan estimates that over the course of reporting the series, the team placed over a thousand phone calls.

“It really is a numbers game,” adds Elliott. “Many, many, many, many people said no to us, or just didn’t return our calls.”

3. Build trust with sources by articulating the big vision of your investigation, and by making sure they understand the concepts of “on the record,” “off the record” and “on background.”

Building trust is key when interviewing sources who don’t have experience talking with reporters. The ProPublica team found the sources they spoke with were by and large persuaded by the bigger picture of the investigation.

“Regardless of where any particular source might fall in the political spectrum, there’s, I think, a very clear public interest case that we should know who is getting access to some of the most powerful government officials — Supreme Court justices —  in the country,” Elliott says.

He adds “it would have been the same case that we were making if we were writing about Elana Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor,” referring to two justices usually regarded as being more ideologically liberal than conservative.

Likewise, being patient and explaining journalistic concepts that define how the information they share will be used — on the record, on background, or off the record, for example — is a great way to get sources to open up.

“Most people, when they get a call, they’ve never spoken to a reporter before,” Kaplan says. “They don’t understand the seriousness with which one takes protecting anonymity. And so, just taking the time to get to know people and to earn that trust, I think it’s critical.”

4. Take advantage of teamwork by divvying the labor.

When embarking on an investigation that will involve hundreds of phone calls and reading reams of records, dividing the work among a small group can save time and allow for collaborative strategizing along the way.  

“The benefit of the dynamic was that while these guys were making calls, I had time to kind of noodle around,” Mierjeski says. “Some of the findings in those stories just came from the ability to spend time searching and fishing.”

With Elliott and Kaplan focusing on contacting sources, Mierjeski was able to track down, for example, coverage in Catholic Cemetery magazine of the statue of Thomas’ teacher, which Crow and his wife paid for, the reporters found. 

There can also be mental health benefits to teamwork, in terms of reporters encouraging each other to press ahead in the face of obstacles.

“For me it would be difficult, as a psychological proposition, to not be sort of paralyzed by the crushing disappointment of failure if you’re just sitting at home alone having seven people in a row ask you how you got their number and then hang up on you,” Elliott says. “It’s sort of like going to the gym — it works better if you have a partner.”

Elliott, Kaplan and Mierjeski were continually communicating, Kaplan says, which was hugely helpful for real-time brainstorming. One example: The realization that polo shirts with the logo for Crow’s yacht could lead to more information about when and where Thomas was on the yacht.

“I remember it was like Friday night at 10 p.m. that one of us realized the Michaela Rose, the yacht logo on the shirts, could be a way to find other potential trips,” Mierjeski says. “The Signal chat was just blown up.”

Elliott adds, “We started looking for every single picture we could find of Justice Thomas wearing a polo shirt to see if there was a logo on it.”

5. Seek visual evidence, especially if a key source won’t talk.

The photos the reporters obtained of Thomas on trips with Crow and Alito holding a fish in Alaska were “very helpful in establishing things, but also, I think, really resonated with people and helped these stories get a wider reach,” Kaplan says.

The photographs were “more powerful than probably any prose we could come up with,” Elliott adds. The reporters found some of them on social media sites, like Instagram and Facebook. The pictures were not just illustrative but were important evidence of places the justices had been.

Alito responded to questions from the ProPublica reporters indirectly — in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Thomas, however, was silent until the first story in the series published.

“It wasn’t like Justice Thomas was going through our very detailed questions that we sent and saying, ‘You have this right, you have this wrong,’” Elliott says. “It was just like, ‘No comment.’ Which can be a sensitive position to be in as a reporter because if you’re getting no engagement, you just have to be right.”

6. Tap into university archives.

The ProPublica team examined numerous archival documents while reporting the series, including from congressional and judiciary archives.

Also among them: university archives, which are often collections of documents and pictures by and about public figures produced throughout their careers. The team early in reporting the series visited the collection of former Justice Antonin Scalia, donated to the Harvard Law School Library after Scalia died in 2016. Many parts of the Scalia archive remain sealed — but photographs weren’t sealed, Kaplan says.

“From the chicken scratch scrawl on the back of some of these photos, we started learning about some of the people that had taken Scalia to an Alaska trip — reporting those out brought us to Alito,” he says.

Kaplan adds: “Figuring out what past or present officials have archives that are at least partially in a university, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be the first reporter to have ever looked at them. And they might have some gold in there.”

Start by looking for archives from universities a public figure has attended or has some other longstanding affiliation with, such as a professorship.

7. Search court documents, which are likely to be public record, for evidence.

When covering a story that deals with private interactions or a government entity not subject to public records laws, look for court cases. Unless a judge seals a case or portions of it, such records often are subject to public inspection.

That’s how the ProPublica team was able to show in their reporting that Crow had paid tuition on behalf of the boy Thomas was raising. The private school had been involved in a bankruptcy and later dissolved, but for a time was required to file financial statements to a federal court. The reporters found those statements through the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, or PACER, an online federal courts document repository.

“Whoever was filing those statements seems to get sloppier and sloppier about redacting them as the case was going on,” Elliot says. “We came across a financial statement from the school that actually showed a wire of money from one of Crow’s companies to the school.”

In July 2009, the company “wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month’s tuition,” the reporters write.

Read the stories

Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire

Clarence Thomas Had a Child in Private School. Harlan Crow Paid the Tuition.

Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court

Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated in Koch Network Donor Events

A ‘Delicate Matter’: Clarence Thomas’ Private Complaints About Money Sparked Fears He Would Resign

The Judiciary Has Policed Itself for Decades. It Doesn’t Work.

The post How they did it: ProPublica investigation unveils ethics scandals at the Supreme Court appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

In the summer of 2022, Michael Sallah, the deputy managing editor of investigations at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, received an email from a source who encouraged him to look at personal injury lawsuits filed in federal court in Pittsburgh. The lawsuits involved Phillips Respironics, one of the leading makers of breathing machines, including ventilators and sleep apnea machines.

The source also sent him a Food and Drug Administration inspection report of one of the Philips factories that made the breathing machines, located on the outskirts of Pittsburgh.

“As we started to dig in and look, it was pretty horrifying stuff that we were coming up with,” Sallah says.

The reporting also revealed that Philips had known about the defective machines since 2010 and didn’t alert the public. Neither did the FDA, which had received warnings about contaminants in the machines.

And in 2021, when the company recalled its popular DreamStation breathing machines, it sent out replacement parts that continued to release cancer-causing chemicals, the investigation revealed.

The reporters also found:

• Philips continued to aggressively market the machines while its own experts warned of the dangers the devices were posing to patients.
• Philips failed to turn over more than 3,700 complaints about the eventually-recalled machines, sometimes waiting years before submitting them to the FDA. The FDA requires companies to disclose patient complaints to the agency within 30 days.
• Other leading device makers also submitted late reports about patient complaints involving flawed pacemakers, prosthetics, dialysis machines and screws and plates for bones. In 2023, 1 in 8 reports from medical device companies, including more than 232,000 complaints, were submitted to the FDA past the 30-day deadline.

As a result of the investigation:

• The Government Accountability Office is launching an investigation of the FDA’s oversight of medical devices. It’s the first in a decade. Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) asked the GAO to investigate how the FDA tracks warnings about dangerous devices, oversees recalls and takes actions against companies.
• Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that oversees consumer product safety, also called for investigations.
• Connecticut’s Attorney General William Tong called for third-party experts to conduct safety tests on recalled machines.
• Philips Respironics announced in January that it was going to stop manufacturing and selling all CPAP machines in the United States.

The reporting team included Sallah, Michael Korsh and Evan Robinson-Johnson from Post-Gazette; Cenziper from ProPublica; and Monica Sager from Northwestern University.

In an interview, Sallah and Cenziper, both Pulitzer Prize winners, share these 11 reporting tips for journalists.

1. To strengthen a reporting project, collaborate with other newsrooms.

After Sallah began looking into the lawsuits in federal court, he reached out to long-time reporting colleague Cenziper to pitch a collaboration. The two had worked together at the Miami Herald and later at The Washington Post and had been wanting to find a collaborative project. This seemed to be the one.

Pittsburgh was ground zero for Philips because it’s where the company manufactured the breathing machines. Meanwhile, ProPublica journalists had a lot of experience writing about the FDA.

“We all bring different strengths, skills and resources to the table,” says Cenziper.

They also collaborated with Mediahuis NRC in Amsterdam, which helped provide sources there at the headquarters for Philips’ parent company, Royal Phillips. They also worked with Northwestern University’s Medill Investigative Lab, where student journalists helped comb through more than 100,000 patient complaints involving Philips breathing machines, filed in FDA’s tracking system since 2010.

2. Collaborate with student journalists.

Cenziper is also a professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and the director of the Medill Investigative Lab. Sallah is a media fellow at the lab.

Cenziper had been working with Medill student journalists for several years on different investigative projects at The Washington Post and ProPublica.

“And both organizations have embraced their work because young journalists bring fresh eyes, fresh perspective, passion and grit to the table,” Cenziper says.

In this case, students helped dig into the data and documents and sit down with families across the country, willing to share their experiences with the breathing machines.

The students were also savvy at mining social media, which helped in finding patients affected by the defective devices.

3. Share information to gain patients’ trust.

The reporters wanted to humanize the stories and they had to get the patients to trust them.

“We’re asking people to basically lead us to their bedrooms, where these breathing machines are set up,” Cenziper says.

So they shared with patients some of the information they had discovered in the FDA reports.

“These folks were living in a vacuum,” Sallah says.

There was very little information available to them to know and understand what the crisis involved. Some had been kept the dark by the company and the FDA for years.

“Debbie and I were able to approach them and offer them a bit more [information] and give them a little sense of guidance so they can navigate things, and in return, some of them were very grateful and seemed to open up more, the more we could share with them,” Sallah says.

“I also think it was in some ways therapeutic for some of the people to share their stories with us,” Cenziper adds. “We sat in so many living rooms — I don’t mean for a quick hour interview; I mean half a day or more — just talking to people and listening to people and looking at their family photos and reading their medical records.”

4. Take the time to gain the trust of internal sources.

It took the reporters many months to get the company scientists to talk. The scientists were hesitant because talking to the press could risk their jobs and reputations and potentially made them vulnerable to libel or defamation lawsuits.

But the reporting team kept calling until one day one scientist agreed to talk, explaining the complexity of the science behind the defective machines and how dangerous the chemicals were to humans.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I still believe that people at the end of the day want to do the right thing,” says Cenziper. “And at the end of the day, our sources believed this company kept a very dangerous secret and that someone needed to provide answers. Someone needed to have to provide transparency.”

The reporters consulted with their editors and lawyers and agreed to protect the identities of their internal sources.

5. Understand the science. Really.

Mastering the data and understanding the science helps you write with authority, Sallah says.

It took the reporters months to understand the complicated science behind volatile organic compounds released from the defective sleep apnea machines.

“It’s really up to you to understand everything. Everything,” Sallah says. “And that meant science, it meant the mechanics as much as we could so that there were no gaps.”

They were meticulous in understanding the toxicology.

“We were primed and briefed over and over about these concepts until we finally absorbed them and understood them,” Sallah says.

When they were talking to experts, they’d ask the basic questions.

“We’d say, ‘Look, this is going to sound like a dumb question, but…’” Sallah says. “And they never took it that way. They were so appreciative of us taking the time to learn this that they made it as basic, as comprehensive, as accurate as they could be.”

6. Find several experts to guide you.

It took many phone calls to find the scientists who were willing to read the FDA reports, take the time to interpret them and weigh in on something that they hadn’t been a part of.

But getting experts was a necessary part of the reporting process.

“When you’re writing about science, always find a guru who can guide you through it,” Cenziper advises.

And rely on more than one expert.

“We didn’t want just one toxicologist. We had three to five,” she says.

When Philips tried to downplay the toxicity of various chemicals, the reporters kept talking with scientists to understand the science and how the machines worked. They eventually realized that there was one thing the company couldn’t reconcile: The chemical cocktail released by the breathing machines triggered what’s known as genotoxicity, which means it can mutate human cells and lead to cancer.

“We reached that point through a lot of our own inquiry into where this finally ends and that’s something [the company] couldn’t dispute,” Sallah says. “You don’t want a ‘he said, she said’ [story]. You want to be able to give the reader some finality and that was one of our quests.”

7. You’ve heard it before, but here it is again: Avoid acronyms and jargon.

Sleep apnea machines are also known as CPAP machines, which stands for continuous positive airway pressure machines. They use mild air pressure to keep breathing airways open while patients sleep.

The reporters didn’t introduce the word CPAP until several paragraphs into their first story. At the beginning and throughout they mostly used “breathing machines” and “sleep apnea machines.”

“We worked very hard at trying to make [the stories] as conversational as we could,” Sallah says. “You’re not writing some sort of a dissertation on the ways in which these machines work. You have to make it interesting. So the ways in which these machines operate have to kind of be woven into the story in a way where it’s still a narrative.”

“I always tell young journalists it doesn’t matter how great your findings are. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to bring down a president,” Cenziper adds. “None of that matters if people stop reading what you wrote.”

8. Don’t settle for long wait periods for your public records (FOIA) requests.

The reporters asked the FDA for documents related to the 2021 Philips breathing machines recall and the health hazards posed by the machines, including internal emails and Philips monthly status reports. When the FDA said it would need more than two years to provide the records, lawyers for ProPublica and Post-Gazette sued the FDA in federal court in New York. Their lawsuit was successful.

“Transparency in this case is a matter of significant and urgent public concern,” Sarah Matthews, ProPublica’s deputy general counsel, said in a statement shared by the news organizations in their Goldsmith application. “These records will shed light on the recall of Philips ventilators and other breathing devices that have put the health of millions of Americans in jeopardy.”

The FDA agreed to turn over the records in batches, which continues to date.

“Our very last story was based entirely on records that we received through FOIA,” Cenziper says.

9. Read the documents. Don’t settle for numbers.

The reporters had a massive data challenge because they were looking at thousands of complaints in an FDA database that was difficult to navigate and manipulate. They eventually paid for a subscription to a proprietary database of the reports, which was more manageable.

But, in addition to getting a sense of the scope of the problem, they began to read the complaints.

“Numbers are just numbers,” Cenziper says. “You need to understand what goes into the data.”

By reading the complaints, the reporters spotted patterns of failure by the FDA.

“If I had a recommendation for other journalists, it would be, look at what’s going into the data. Take the time to read documents,” Cenziper says. “Don’t just publish summary numbers.”

10. When covering medical devices, understand the role of regulators.

The FDA has made a lot of progress in overseeing pharmaceuticals, but its process is different for medical devices. The FDA mostly leaves it up to the medical device industry to regulate itself, the reporters explain.

“And that can be dangerous because the guinea pigs are the patients, the people, who are out there, who need these devices and it can take years of deaths and injuries before they finally figure out this device is hurting people,” Sallah says.

Take the time to understand the role of government regulators and the history of gaps and weaknesses in their oversight, he advises.

“It’s not just going to be the devices themselves that break down, but it’s also how long it takes for the government to respond and to take action despite all the enforcement tools it has at its disposal,” Sallah says.

11. Keep a timeline.

One of the reporters’ organizing tips is to create a timeline, especially for large investigative projects.

“We did a very big 40-some page timeline with hyperlinks,” Cenziper says. “That not only helped us get our thoughts together and our lede and nutgraf, but also helped us organize the stories.”

“That was the single most important document that we created,” Sallah says of the shared document.

They also published a timeline of the events, starting from when the breathing machines arrived in the market. 

Read the stories

With Every Breath: Millions of breathing machines, one dangerous defect

Portraits of Pain

A Failure to Protect: Millions of people used tainted breathing machines. The FDA failed to use its power to shield them.

Millions of People Used Tainted Breathing Machines. The FDA Failed to Use Its Power to Protect Them.

Senators call for probe into FDA’s oversight of medical devices, citing series on Philips CPAP recall

Philips Recalled Breathing Machines in 2021. Chemicals of “Concern” Found in Replacement Machines Raised New Alarm.

Video: “With Every Breath” Captures the Human Toll of Philips’ Failure to Disclose Dangerous Defects of Its CPAP Devices

Timeline: Inside Philips, an unfolding crisis

Follow the latest news.

The post How they did it: A reporting team led by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and ProPublica exposes dangerous defect in popular breathing machine appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

It was no surprise to Jerry Mitchell to learn high-ranking law enforcement officials had been accused of behaving badly in parts of Mississippi where journalists had not kept a watchful eye.

But the details he and his colleagues at Mississippi Today and The New York Times uncovered during a yearlong investigation shocked even this veteran journalist, who has been exposing corruption in the state’s criminal justice system for more than 30 years.

The project uncovered decades of allegations of sex abuse, torture, bribery, retaliation and other abuses of power at sheriff’s offices across the state. When Mitchell and a fellow journalist at Mississippi Today, Ilyssa Daly, started looking into claims made about one sheriff in 2022, residents came forward with what seemed like unbelievable stories about other sheriffs as well as detectives and patrol deputies in different parts of the state.

The combined efforts of these journalists and journalism organizations produced the seven-story series, “Unfettered Power: Mississippi Sheriffs.” It revealed that:

• A sheriff in Noxubee County, located on the Mississippi-Alabama border, allegedly demanded that a woman being held in the county jail send him sexually explicit photos and videos and ignored her complaint that she had been coerced into having sex with two deputies.
• Multiple women accused a sheriff in Clay County, in northeastern Mississippi, of sexually harassing or coercing them. For example, an incarcerated woman accused the sheriff of arranging for her and another prisoner to be brought to his house, where they had to change into boxer shorts and pose for photos. A Clay County Sheriff’s Office employee told journalists she picked up two female prisoners from the sheriff’s house and returned them to the jail.
• A sheriff in Rankin County, in the middle of the state, allegedly lied to get grand jury subpoenas to spy on his married girlfriend.
• Rankin County narcotics detectives and patrol officers, some of whom referred to themselves as the “Goon Squad,” allegedly used Tasers and waterboarding to torture people into confessing to drug crimes or providing information. Of the drug raids the journalists examined, the biggest involved a $420 sale of heroin. The series identified 20 of the deputies present during those incidents.

“All of this reporting has just been beyond the pale,” Mitchell says. “A lot of this has been totally shocking to me.”

A lack of oversight in Mississippi

The series also documents how the three sheriffs operated largely without oversight and avoided being investigated for a range of serious allegations.

For example, a district attorney compiled a report of evidence collected against Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey in 2016 but stopped investigating, in part because he was friends with Bailey. Although he shared details with two local judges and forwarded the investigation to the state’s attorney general, the case ended there, Daly and Mitchell reported in September.

When a former deputy called Bailey to warn him about the Goon Squad, Bailey called him “a dirty cop and accused him of secretly recording the call,” Howey and Rosenfield write in a November article.

The impact

The series jarred public leaders. Earlier this year, state legislators introduced a bill that would allow the Mississippi Board on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Training to investigate law enforcement misconduct. The measured passed the Mississippi House unanimously last week and was sent to the senate.

The series also spurred federal action. Several weeks after journalists asked about the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s languishing investigation of former Noxubee County Sheriff Terry Grassaree, he was indicted on bribery charges. After the story about him ran in April, he was indicted on additional charges.

Immediately after the two news outlets published the piece on Rankin County’s Goon Squad, attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division flew to the state capital to meet with the president of the local chapter of the NAACP. Days later, the U.S. Attorney’s Office put out a press release urging victims to come forward.

Federal officials put up billboards, too, urging residents to report police brutality to the FBI.

Meanwhile, on March 19, two members of Rankin’s Goon Squad were sentenced to prison for torturing two Black men last year using Tasers, a sex toy and other objects. One of the victims was shot in the mouth. On March 20, two other former deputies were sentenced for their part in the torture, one of whom received a 40-year federal prison sentence.

We asked the reporting team for advice to help other journalists take on similar projects. Below, we highlight four of the tips they shared.  

1. If you report on law enforcement agencies, get their Taser log data.

Data collected from deputies’ Tasers played a key role in Howey and Rosenfield’s reporting on Rankin County deputies’ use of force. It allowed them to confirm victim statements and demonstrate when, where, how, and how long deputies fired their Tasers while on the job.

“One running theme we kept hearing again and again is people being tased and Tasers being used as torture weapons,” Rosenfield says.

Many Tasers keep detailed digital records of their use. The Rankin County Sheriff’s Office gathers that data to compile departmentwide logs. Mississippi Today and The New York Times examined 24 years of the agency’s Taser data.

The journalists determined, for example, that three deputies triggered their Tasers a combined 14 times during a 2018 home raid over an $80 sale of methamphetamine. The four men at the home that night said deputies beat them and used Tasers and a blowtorch while interrogating them.

Howey and Rosenfield reported the Taser logs also showed that “[a]t least 32 times over the past decade, Rankin deputies fired their Tasers more than five times in under an hour, activating them for at least 30 seconds in total — double the recommended limit. Experts in Taser use who reviewed the logs called these incidents highly suspicious.”

Rosenfield recommends asking industry experts and academic researchers for help understanding Taser log data and identifying potentially problematic patterns.

“We talked to lots of use of force experts to find out what we could actually glean from the logs and how to read them correctly to contextualize them,” he adds.

2. Be kind and transparent. Sources may be more willing to help if you’ve treated them well.

Daly, the lead reporter on the project, spent hours driving across the state with Mitchell, interviewing sources, tracking down court files and transcripts, and digging through stacks of paper records in various government offices and facilities.

When she’s  out reporting, she says she tries to treat everyone she encounters with kindness. She also aims for transparency, so sources know what she plans to do with the information they share with her.

She calls this approach “walking in the sunshine.”

“Always walk in the sunshine with whatever you’re doing and be friendly and polite and make source connections with everyone around you — because you don’t know who’s going to help you with the thing you need most,” she says.

It paid big dividends for her last year, when an assistant records clerk she saw often at a local courthouse went out of her way to find a case file. Details from the case, filed in 2012 by a former prisoner accusing Clay County Sheriff Eddie Scott of sex abuse, were crucial to the story about Scott.

Initially, no one could locate the file, which Daly later learned probably had been missing for years.

“The woman comes back and can’t find it and she’s freaking out and she’s saying, ‘This has never happened before,’” Daly says.

Daly helped search the office’s paper files but also came up emptyhanded.

A couple weeks later, she and Mitchell returned to the courthouse with a different strategy for gathering bits of information from court filings, to try to figure out what information the missing file contained. When the head clerk spotted the two journalists, she told them the assistant clerk found the file they wanted.

The assistant clerk had spent days looking for the file and found it misplaced in another part of the clerk’s office. What it contained: The only public record of a local woman’s allegations that Scott, when he was the county’s chief deputy, had coerced her into a sexual relationship after her arrest. He had promised to use his influence to help her, she writes in the court filing. She says they had sex in his patrol car, parked on a hog farm, on at least five occasions.

The file also contained hand-written, suggestive letters that Scott sent to her in prison in 2011, months before he became sheriff. Mississippi Today and The New York Times published one of those letters.

“You never know which source might go that extra mile,” Daly says.

3. Understand that the way you present yourself through your words, actions and appearance can create or break down barriers between you and members of the public.

For Howey, one of toughest parts of the series was getting people to open up, especially those living in communities that have been regularly targeted by law enforcement.

He discovered that being himself, which meant not hiding his tattoos and piercings, helped him connect with residents in the rural and lower-income communities he visited. Sometimes, he wore a T-shirt to interviews — for his own comfort and so people he approached might be less apprehensive or suspicious of him.

“Usually, the people with the big vocabularies and nice wardrobes are the people who put them in the positions they’re in,” Howey says.

He notes that most people can “sniff out insincerity.”

“I just approach people as myself instead of a stuffy, professional reporter,” he says. “It’s about finding that line that allows you to stay professional and allows you to be personable enough for people to see you’re a real human being.”

If someone starts confiding in you, they might tell others you’re trustworthy.

“I’ve had situations where I’m talking to people and they’ll make a phone call [to a potential source] and say, ‘He’s actually cool,’” Howey says. “That has gotten me interviews.”

4. Use digital tools such as Pinpoint and Descript to make your job easier.

Two of the investigative team’s favorite digital tools are Descript and Google’s Pinpoint.

Descript is a video editing app. You can use it to record, edit and transcribe videos as well as collaborate on videos and podcasts. Rosenfield and Howey use it for transcribing audio files.

There is a free version, but they recommend investing in the paid version, which starts at $12 a month. The free version comes with one hour of transcription per month while the entry-level paid plan provides 10 hours a month.

Pinpoint is a free research tool that lets you examine and search large collections of documents quickly. You can also use it to transcribe audio and video files and sort documents according to key words and phrases, including locations and people’s names.

“It’s a great resource when you’re grappling with reams of court and police records and it’s a mixture of digital and paper,” Howey explains. “This tool allows you to compile everything into one folder and makes it all text searchable so it’s easy to extract information. It’s extremely useful. We used it constantly to look for patterns in police reports, to pull certain records out without spending 20 minutes looking for them in folders.”

Read the stories

Sex Abuse, Beatings and an Untouchable Mississippi Sheriff

Where the sheriff is king, these women say he coerced them into sex

The Sheriff, His Girlfriend and His Illegal Subpoenas

How a ‘Goon Squad’ of Deputies Got Away With Years of Brutality

Who Investigates the Sheriff? In Mississippi, Often No One.

The post How they did it: Mississippi Today and The New York Times reveal sex abuse, torture allegations at sheriff’s offices appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

“In some respects, there was nothing unusual about the killing of Walter Gonzalez.

Eighty-six pedestrians had already died in car crashes in New York City last year by October 23, when a driver slammed a pick-up truck into Gonzalez in Brooklyn. It was not out of the ordinary that the driver was speeding, nor that his license had been revoked months prior.

But there was one thing that stood out about the crash: the paper license plate hanging from the back of the truck.”

-The lede to “Ghost Tags: Inside New York City’s Black Market for Temporary License Plates,” by Jesse Coburn

In April 2023, online news outlet Streetsblog NYC published the first story in a four-part investigation exposing a vast black market for temporary license plate tags, the massive scale of which was not publicly known.

Temporary tags are legal when someone buys a car. In New Jersey, for example, a dealer issues the buyer weatherized paper tags to display until metal plates come in the mail.

But it is illegal for dealers to issue temporary tags absent a car sale. It is also remarkably easy for dealers to sell those tags on the black market. And when dealers were caught, the penalties were small — before the series from Streetsblog investigative reporter Jesse Coburn.

Further, “Drivers were using them to mask their identities while evading tolls and traffic cameras, or while committing more serious crimes, authorities said,” Coburn writes.

At the time the Streetsblog investigation was published, auto dealers fraudulently selling authentic tags could fetch $100 to $200 apiece, while the maximum violation for a first-time offense in New Jersey was $500, Coburn found. One dealer in New Jersey issued tens of thousands of tags in 2021, and “could have made millions of dollars,” if all those were sold on the black market, Coburn writes.

Coburn’s seven-month investigation was built upon nearly 50 public records requests he filed, particularly from motor vehicle authorities in New Jersey and Georgia, for information on dealers illegally issuing temporary tags. Those tags, Coburn found, were being issued by dealers who appeared by and large not to be engaged in any legitimate business.

“The data really tells the story because it’s like, here’s this dealership that has no online presence, none whatever, no listing on Google Maps — none of the trappings of a successful car dealership — issuing tens of thousands of temp tags every year,” Coburn says.

Since the Streetsblog series, New Jersey has imposed tougher restrictions on temporary tags, including potential prison time and fines up to $10,000 for violators. A lawmaker in Georgia has also introduced legislation aimed at curtailing the market for fraudulent temporary tags there.

“New Jersey and Georgia have also shut down dozens of dealers for temp tag fraud since the series came out and proposed $150,000 in fines,” Coburn says. “Seven of the dealers that I sort of flagged to these states as possible temp tag violators are now under criminal investigation.”

Keep reading for four tips from Coburn based on his investigation, including how it came about, how he got people buying and selling temporary tags to talk to him, and the types of sources he thinks are most compelling.

1. Stay alert — is there something weird in your neighborhood?

Being an investigative reporter isn’t necessarily about having deep government sources or getting your hands on an incendiary tip, Coburn says. Sometimes, a strong investigation can come from staying alert to changes in the places you frequent.

“During the pandemic, in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, I started seeing tons of these paper license plates on cars from out of state — Texas, New Jersey, Georgia, Virginia, Maryland,” Coburn says. “And, you know, I’m sort of wondering what this is about.”

Coburn says he saw some local news coverage of illicit temporary tags in New York City, but those stories were driven mostly by police reports and press conferences.

“It just seemed inconceivable to me that so many people had just bought cars in Texas or Georgia,” he adds.

So, he began filing public records requests for data on temporary tags issued by auto dealers in New Jersey.

“What I saw was that there were these dealerships that were issuing massive numbers of tags — 10, 20,000 tags in a single year,” Coburn says. “Which should mean that that dealership is selling that many cars.”

He started digging into one dealer, F&J Auto Mall in Bridgeton, New Jersey, and learned it “issued 36,000 temporary license plates in 2021 — more than any other dealership in the state, including the used-car juggernauts Carvana and CarMax combined,” Coburn writes in Part 1 of the series.

Coburn recalls that when he looked up the publicly available address for F&J, Google Maps images showed a “warehouse in the middle of nowhere, with no big sign out front. A giant parking lot that was totally empty. That was the moment I was like, ‘There’s something really crazy going on here.’”

2. To ‘find your Virgil,’ try old-fashioned cold calling.

Cold calling may not feel like the most natural thing in the world, but if you don’t otherwise have good sources for your story, a few dozen unsolicited calls can work.

That’s what Coburn did when he realized he needed reputable auto dealers to walk him through what the data indicated about F&J. He searched for dealerships in northern New Jersey, close enough to his home base to potentially visit in person.

Initially, the response from auto dealers was “chilly” and “people were very skittish,” Coburn says. But before long, he struck journalistic gold.

“It took me about a dozen dealerships,” he says. “But, eventually, I got this guy on the phone named Abdul Cummings.”

As an émigré from Palestine running a legitimate used auto dealership, Cummings was troubled by the illegal activity happening in his industry, Coburn says. Cummings immediately began describing to Coburn how the paper tag fraud worked. Coburn recalls that Cummings was “very candid, and smart” with “a lot of integrity.”

“Find your Virgil,” Coburn advises, referring to the ancient Roman poet, a fictional version of whom shepherds Dante through hell in the Divine Comedy. “Someone who can kind of guide you through.”

Coburn found many other key sources through cold calls, such as Jose Cordero, who told Coburn he made $18,200 selling temporary tags before New Jersey authorities caught him.

3. Use court calendars to find sources involved in active cases.

Coburn identified temporary tag buyers through cold calls, but also by looking at WebCriminal, the online criminal court portal for New York.

“It’s extremely Web 1.0 — it’s very hard to use,” Coburn says. “But there is a wealth of information if you kind of know how to find it. And so eventually, I figured out how to search the court calendars for every day, and to search by violation.”

The violation for possessing illegal temporary tags is called “criminal possession of a forged instrument.” Coburn would search for people being arraigned on that charge and potentially related charges, such as driving with a suspended license.

“I would just sit in court and wait for their hearing to be called,” he says. “You know, I just had this list of names. And then after they were arraigned, I approached them and tried to talk to them — and was once again amazed at how candid people were.”

That’s how Coburn got the story of Adrian Mocha, who had his license suspended. In the span of one year, Mocha went through “eight or nine” temporary tags, according to Part 3 of the investigation. Coburn simply approached Mocha and interviewed him following one of Mocha’s court dates.

4. Seek sources outside the spotlight for interesting anecdotes.

Politicians and other high-profile officials are often used to interacting with members of the news media. They may be guarded and self-aware in what they publicly convey. But people who have less or no experience talking with reporters provided some of the more interesting details in Coburn’s story — such as Ali Ahmed, manager at Zack Auto Sales, which is registered in New Jersey, according to Coburn’s reporting.

Coburn visited Zack Auto Sales and asked Ahmed about the 999 temporary tags the dealership issued in 2022, despite having no presence online. Ahmed said, “If you’re going to go deep, and I find it, and you go to ask about my company in Trenton and New Jersey, you’re going to get trouble with it, believe me,” Coburn writes in Part 2 of the series. Ahmed said they “retail and wholesale [cars] online, like a broker,” according to Coburn’s reporting.

“Streetsblog did not find evidence that Zack Auto Sales illegally sells temporary license plates,” Coburn writes. “But one car wholesaler and one car broker based in New Jersey told Streetsblog that wholesalers and brokers have no reason to issue large numbers of temp tags.”

Coburn also recalls the compelling story of how Kareem Ulloa-Alvarado discovered he had been unknowingly delivering temporary tags for a dealership for a few weeks in December 2022 and January 2023, after finding the gig on Craigslist.

In Part 4 of the series, Coburn reports that Ulloa-Alvarado didn’t realize he was doing anything illegal until he was attacked at knifepoint during a delivery in the Bronx. When he went to police, a detective told Ulloa-Alvarado that he could be arrested for delivering fake tags if he filed a report about the assault. “Kareem was shocked,” Coburn writes.

“They were very interesting, original people,” he says. “I like stories where I’m not just speaking to media-trained government officials.”

Read the stories

Part 1: The Dealers

Part 2: The Landlords

Part 3: The Buyers

‘Duped’: A Harlem 20-Something Blows the Whistle on an Illegal Temporary License Plate Business

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